The Software as a Service or SaaS model is gaining ground in many IT strategic planning sessions for the following reasons:

• A good SaaS partnership will offload the necessity to build and maintain an IT infrastructure to support the service.
• The need to continually develop enhancements in order to stay competitive shifts to the SaaS provider.
• Support headaches are mainly dealt with by the provider.
• Initial costs are far lower than yearly or perpetual licenses.
• Long term costs can also be lower as professional services fees may be non-existent.

Sounds to good to be true, right?  It all depends on the SaaS provider – can they deliver or not?

The SaaS decision came to a head in late 2008 in my position as IS Director at eRepublic when the company was at a crossroads: should we continue to push hard on proprietary development on our LAMP object relational database, API and CMS or should we embrace a SaaS provider and focus on our core strengths of being the leading publishing, event, research and new media company for state and local government?

Should the IS Department continue to expand and literally become a leading player in the CMS or Web Content Management (WCM) space?

The pressures on my department were continuing to accelerate and the existing CMS was being compared to other leading Web 2.0 content sites like YouTube, Flickr, Nytimes.com and others.

In the final analysis, the company would either have to fund a web development team focused soley on constantly developing and enhancing our proprietary system; or search out and adopt a SaaS provider.

We eventually selected and adopted the leading SaaS WCM provider – Clickability.com out of San Francisco.  They have focused on providing a robust solution for other media companies and their service was a good fit for eRepublic.

Since that adoption we have rolled out Convergemag.com and eRepublic.com with seven other sites being migrated over and slated to launch this year.

Overall, I give Clickability a hearty two-thumbs-up!

In another post, I will detail the technology that Clickability uses and why we felt it was robust enough for our purposes.