Software Marketing Advisor Blog

SaaS revenue comes from a utility computing environment in which unrelated customers share a common application and infrastructure managed by an independent software vendor or a third-party service provider that typically owns the code  or intellectual property. The model provides access to and consumption of software and application functionality built specifically for network delivery and accessed by users over the Internet.

SaaS revenues do not include software deployed internally by the customer or any packaged software for which a license fee and a maintenance fee are paid. The myriad ‘as a service’ (APPaaS, PaaS, IaaS) offerings—including business application services, databases, software development tools, high-level storage services (backup
and archiving), testing as a service, and security as a service—are all included in the category of SaaS.

A company might come to market with something it broadly calls SaaS, when in reality one business unit is doing SaaS and the other is doing PaaS. But each model…