Recent advances in IT have allowed businesses to enhance value and gain a competitive advantage. The right investment in enterprise software will help your business boost employee productivity and therefore help the bottom line.

By David Eisner

January 7, 2011  ( PowerHomeBiz.com )  - Recent advances in IT have allowed businesses to enhance value and gain a competitive advantage. The right investment in enterprise software will help your business boost employee productivity and therefore help the bottom line.

Many off-the-shelf enterprise software applications exist that help to automate common business practices ranging from accounting to membership management to sales force automation. Unfortunately, finding the ideal business application to match your particular business is often not as easy as one might think.

Finding the perfect software fit typically means hiring a firm to create a custom software program, but building your business a “killer app” can be consuming, costly and risky.

Instead, consider Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), or Internet based software solutions. SaaS can provide your business with the best of both worlds, including the ability to limit development time and deployment costs while still offering the flexibility of a custom solution.

SaaS solutions are based on the idea that sharing resources provided by experts is more cost-effective and yields better results. A business “rents” the expensive software infrastructure including web, database and the hardware needed to run it from a provider and pays them an affordable monthly fee.

The application is highly customizable to fit a business’ needs. Best of all, to run a SaaS solution, all that is needed is a PC with a reliable Internet connection. Users can connect to your company’s SaaS business application from virtually anywhere.

There is also seamless integration as SaaS applications are easily integrated into virtually any existing software within a business. These solutions can also easily expand their capabilities to cater to any increased usage in an organization once the minimal hardware is in position.

Consider checking out some SaaS products that allow a business to create a free account for a limited number of users. This provides businesses with the opportunity to fully investigate the product without any initial expenditure.

Most SaaS providers such as Inuit’s popular QuickBase application (http://www.quickbase.com) or SalesForce.com’s CRM system (http://www.salesforce.com) come ready to run with previously created templates and designs that are straightforward and easy to manipulate.

When licensing SaaS software solutions, consider purchasing single-seat licenses for current users rather than an enterprise-wide license. You can always scale up with more licenses as needed. Regardless of your task or budget, there is probably a SaaS software solution that can help your workforce become more productive.