On Demand solutions are the fastest growing software sector.

Here are just a few of the advantages of the on-demand model, compared to the traditional on-premise model:

Unparalleled time to value

Apttus minimizes the risk involved in implementing business applications by eliminating the need for up-front capital investment, making the path to deployment success exceptionally short. Apttus implementations usually take less than a month and rarely exceed three months, compared to 12 months or longer with traditional software. According to a recent study by Triple Tree and the Software and Information Industry Association (SIIA), on-demand deployments are 50 to 90 percent faster, with a total cost of ownership five to ten times less than installed software.

Less expensive

Initially and in the long run. It’s easy to see why a multi-tenant, on-demand solution is much less expensive initially. There is no hardware to purchase, scale, and maintain, no operating systems, database servers, or application servers to install, no consultants and staff to manage it, and no need for periodic upgrades.

Even more important, however, are the long-term savings. Gartner estimates that two thirds of IT time and budgets is spent on maintaining infrastructure and dealing with updates. That’s a thing of the past with the on-demand model.

On-demand deployments also have fewer hidden costs. A fully-loaded, five-year total cost of ownership (TCO) study for a 50-seat project considered several often hidden cost factors, ranging from needs analyses to internal downtime. This study showed the TCO of a premise-based solution to be 2.5 times as high as that of an on-demand solution. See Total Cost of Ownership

Easy upgrades

Customers of on-demand applications benefit from instant deployment of new versions, which means our entire customer base is always on the latest version. Since customizations and integrations are maintained through upgrades, change management discussions can focus on taking immediate advantage of the new features and innovations available with each release.

Better service delivery

Due to the on-demand model's tremendous economies of scale and Salesforce’s eight-year focus on service delivery, salesforce.com can provide higher service levels than the vast majority of companies can achieve on their own. The best technologies, policies, and procedures are used to ensure security at the facilities, application, and network level; to ensure maximum uptime and continuous availability; and to provide a performance record we’re proud of. Salesforce is the only provider who makes performance statistics available on a public site: http://trust.salesforce.com.

Better scalability

Successful businesses are continually changing and growing: Employee growth, transaction growth, the launching of new products and services, mergers and acquisitions, or any number of business events can dramatically and suddenly alter business needs.

Solutions from large enterprise software vendors are expensive to scale because of the complexity and cost of scaling each layer of the hardware and software stacks. Complex system replacements and data migrations are necessary. Legacy systems developed with J2EE, .NET, or open source tools are similarly difficult to scale because of such infrastructure issues and changing or unforeseen business requirements. Force.com is the only platform that grows, scales, and adapts with your changing business.

Easier to customize

Users of on-premise solutions have no choice but to wait weeks or months for even minor modifications to their applications, and in some cases their requests are never met at all. Apttus leverages Force.com  to make performing basic customizations to the user interface and underlying data objects easy, so that even business users can customize in minutes, without programming. Without the burden of fulfilling constant requests for minor customizations, IT is free to concentrate on performing more advanced customizations, such as associating specific behavior with objects that can be triggered by a wide range of system events.

Satisfied and productive users

A major reason on-premise deployments often fail is because of low user adoption—data that’s cluttered or difficult to get to quickly results in user resistance. Force.com’s award-winning, easy-to-use interface has resulted in the highest user adoption rates in the industry.

Easy administration