Under the name Software as a Service (SaaS), a business model based on subscriptions began to be defined a couple of years ago, which has known its great emergence with the promotion of the digital transition to the Cloud.
Services become subscriptions that facilitate recurring income for companies and more affordable payments for users
From that initial acronym (SaaS) in which the business model was based on software, it evolved to include other technological environments. In this way, Platform as a Service (PaaS) or Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and others were born, so that it ended up being called Everything as a Service (XaaS) or Everything as a Service to the subscription services to a wide catalog of actions, technologies or tools that companies make available to their customers through Cloud environments: monitoring, storage, databases, networks, communications, customer service, marketing…
Even the use of certain shades of colors. An example is that Pantone will begin to allow the use of certain proprietary color mixtures of said platform only through subscription to users of Adobe products (Photoshop, InDesign or Illustrator).
Is about a business model that contains different benefits both for the company that offers them and for the client that receives them. In the case of the company, subscriptions offer results that end and retain the customer and ensure recurring income. For customers, it represents a model with great comfort, and with easy access to contracted products or services and that, being based on payment for use, allows and the consequent savings, ruling out high entry prices in some cases can be a barrier to consumption. .
And as an example of this tendency, suffice it to enumerate some that explain theThe evolution in terms of consumption in recent decadestransforming from the acquisition of products at a higher price and in a single disbursement to monthly payment in smaller amounts for receiving a service.
Thus, it has gone from acquiring the Microsoft Windows office suite to a monthly or annual subscription to Office 365. Other similar evolutions are those that have changed the habit of acquiring music or video game discs in physical format to keeping a platform subscription like Spotify-Apple Music or Steam-PlayStation Now.
In the case of content such as movies, series or documentaries, the situation is repeated. In fact, in the most paradigmatic case, when talking about streaming platforms and referring to Netflix, it was a pioneer in abandoning the DVD rental model to live orA transition to the Cloud model that allows access to all its contents through the Internet.
A model that has later been replicated by multiple platforms, until reaching the so-called “Streaming Wars” with a view of competitors: Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV +, Disney +, Filmin, Flixolé, HBO Max…
Significant support has taken place for XaaS services starting with the generalization of remote work and telecommuting as a consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic. Due to the great advance in communications and the hosting of multiple companies’ servers in the Cloud, this multiconnected XaaS business has asserted its agility, versatility and possibilities to more and more services that can adopt this innovative, flexible and scalable model.
As shortcomings, it can be pointed out that Being a complex system, it requires demanding maintenance. and, as they are sometimes outside the direct supervision of the company providing the service (which hosts its software or its database on remote or even external servers, by paying a hosting and management service in the Cloud to third parties), they can failures that affect a wide spectrum of users.
