As the economy continues along its bumpy road, the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS (
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According to a recent report, CFOs and senior finance executives with decision making responsibilities – within all types and sizes of user firms – say they will use SaaS in the coming year to improve their abilities to meet critical business goals, including finance's abilities to play a more strategic role in business.
"Today, it is not just sales and human resource departments taking advantage of SaaS,” said Bill McNee, Saugatuck Technology founder and CEO. ”Finance organizations see SaaS as increasingly critical to their evolving business goals, and are increasingly investing in SaaS for both point financial processes as well as core systems of record."
The report from Saugatuck Technology titled "Great Expectations: SaaS Strategies in the Finance Organization," was released today. To learn more about the report, go to
http://www.saugatech.com/561order.htm
In fact, says McNee who co-authored the report, finance executives expect SaaS to enable improvement in all aspects of core and non-core finance systems and operations.
While starting from a much lower account penetration base than payroll, SaaS adoption within key financial functions and processes such as electronic billing, cash management, core financial accounting, tax management, budgeting, governance risk and compliance (GRC) and business intelligence (BI) will experience explosive growth of between 40 percent to more than 100 percent by the end of 2010, according to McNee.
The study’s key findings include:
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CFOs see SaaS as a way to bridge many of the "effectiveness gaps" that exist relative to how well current on-premise systems address their evolving mission and goals.
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The four business goals that CFOs believe SaaS can most improve the effectiveness of Finance include improving ROI, managing performance in the context of risk, reducing process inefficiencies, and optimizing business processes.
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SaaS is seen by CFOs not as a cross-Finance panacea, but as a means to enable better, more cost-effective operations.
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Finance executives see SaaS as a cost-effective means of getting their organizations out of software and systems management, and enabling them to focus more on their core competency - Finance.
The results of the report from Saugatuck Technology were culled from data, analysis and recommendations from two research programs that included Web surveys focusing on buyer requirements and demand.
The annual survey consists of business, finance and IT user executives' related to their SaaS and business strategies and activity of senior finance executives. It was conducted in partnership with Finance Executives International / FEI and the Finance Executives Research Foundation / FERF.
Both research programs also included briefings with leading and emerging SaaS solution providers, and follow-up deep-dive interviews with survey participants.
Tim Gray is a Web Editor for TMCnet, covering news in the IP communications, call center and customer relationship management industries. To read more of Tim’s articles, please visit his columnist page.
Edited by
Tim Gray
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