Sourcing Requirements and Designs for Software as a Service

Software as a Service (SaaS) has become an important pragmatic in the world of enterprise software and business services markets. SaaS supports the concept of outsourcing where business processes are offered under a service level agreement for a given price. However, sourcing SaaS may not always involve outsourcing with respect to the transfer of internal activities and resources to external service providers. Users of SaaS need to know what strategies to use when determining sourcing requirements. In this paper, the authors develop a classification for sourcing SaaS based on Kraljic's matrix and a mapping of SaaS services to the sourcing structures. Further, they evaluate the proposed sourcing models against two real world case studies.