Insurance Software as a Service
Proactively securing the costs of doing business
With an insurance Software as a Service model, such as SIS’ Partner XE agency management system, the real cost savings comes in the form of your ability to proactively secure your cost of doing business and effectively and evenly allocate your cash outlay over a long-term period. Instead of a large initial cash outlay followed by peaks and valleys of expenditures, you are dealing with a consistent, monthly, budgetable cost.
In addition, studies have shown that the total cost of ownership for SaaS models can be significantly less than on- premise solutions.
When you are looking at the total cost of ownership for SaaS, as compared to an on-premise insurance software model, you need to consider a number of factors. One way to look at it is to think about the cash outlay you put into your current system (both on capital and operational expenditures) and compare it to the monthly fee charged by your prospective SaaS provider.
What are you spending on…
Capital Expenditures?
- Servers
- Network storage
- Backup systems
- Disaster recovery systems
- Power and cooling systems
- Data centers
- Infrastructure stack software
- Third party modules or applications
- License & license support fees
Operational Expenditures?
- Installation
- Networking operations
- Utility costs
- Application implementation and support
- Licensed professional services
- Technical training
- End-user support
- Annual software maintenance fees
- Implementation of large scale patches and upgrades
- Routine and unexpected troubleshooting/ maintenance
- Employee down-time when they have to take time off to perform the above tasks
You may look at the upfront investments you have already made in your on-premise system as “already paid for.” If this is the case, consider the fact that the average shelf life of a system is anywhere between seven and ten years while server hardware will need to be replaced every 3-5 years. They won’t last forever. These are costs that will occur again and again.
The bottom line, when doing any sort of comparison, is that it is necessary to take in all costs, extended over the total lifespan of the application.
