As Software as a Service becomes more and more popular, many Product Managers find themselves faced with this inevitable roadmap question – Should I offer a SaaS version of my product? If I do not, am I inviting my competitors to own the space? If I do, how do I offer my traditional licensed and installed software product as a service?

I am going to take several postings to describe what you need to know to answer the who, what, where, how and why of a SaaS migration.

Before we get started, let’s set a baseline for discussion – Software as a Service, or SaaS, is exactly what it sounds like it is. You provide all of the hosting, security, storage and bandwidth necessary to run your application for your users and they simply log in and get to work. Overall, it’s an excellent deal for the customer – they can reduce their IT budget and increase their expectations! (Note: Just because it’s an excellent deal, doesn’t mean that it will be an easy sell – big companies are wary of letting their data live outside their walls.)

At first glance, this doesn’t seem all that daunting. After all, many traditional, customer installed products offer a web interface. You may be tempted to think that you just need to host the servers at a data center instead of at the customer site, open some firewall holes and you’re good to go. If that is your perspective, then this series of postings are going to be a very enlightening journey.