Whether or not Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) adoption pays off depends heavily on the maturity of the vendor's infrastructure. Take time to assess the vendor's SaaS infrastructure carefully and avoid making a hurried and costly decision.

Buyers Are Willing, but Assessment Tools Are Weak

SaaS vendors are expanding their offerings to new enterprise application lines and industries. While the promise of SaaS is significant, the SaaS market is still immature. Therefore, IT decision makers must exercise caution when selecting a vendor.

Decision makers lack the tools and resources required to perform a comprehensive evaluation. Additionally, the rapidly changing SaaS market makes it difficult for buyers that are "in the trenches" to rise above the vendor hype, and get a true picture of current SaaS offerings.

Knowing the Right Place to Look

Selecting a SaaS vendor that has the greatest mindshare or largest market share may be a failsafe strategy for CRM or ERP SaaS applications. This strategy will not work for talent management or project management SaaS applications. Market- and application-agnostic assessment strategies...