The Benefits Of Centralized SaaS Strategy

Developing a centralized software-as-a-service (SaaS) strategy has become a bigger priority for sourcing and vendor management professionals over the past year. Firms are not only expanding their current SaaS implementations but are also expanding SaaS usage into new business applications. Horizontal business processes, such as customer relationship management (CRM) and human capital management (HCM), continue to be the most popular areas for SaaS spending because SaaS applications started in these categories and have matured significantly over the years. But firms are now expanding SaaS usage into other categories, such as collaboration, IT management, and industry-specific applications. Spending on SaaS is now becoming substantial enough to disrupt other technology spend and affect negotiations for other software spending. Forrester expects organizations to increasingly centralize their SaaS purchasing strategy to get the most value out of SaaS and minimize risks.