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JSW
2008

Is SOA Superior? Evidence from SaaS Financial Statements

13 years 10 months ago
Is SOA Superior? Evidence from SaaS Financial Statements
We use audited financial statements to examine claims that service-oriented architecture (SOA) leads to higher profits relative to traditional software delivery models. Specifically, we examine vendors that rely on the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) pricing model, and compare their performance to other firms that still use the traditional perpetual license model. We find that, relative to their peers, SaaS firms tend to have lower costs of goods sold as a portion of revenues. Compared to their software firm peers, SaaS firms are also younger, smaller, possess less financial leverage, and have higher costs (sales, general, and administrative) relative to revenues. Pure, per-unit costs of hosted SOA applications do not appear to be lower, however, compared to firms that specialize in retail provision of mass market software. This leads us to conclude that, despite the predictions of the most ardent adherents of SOA and SaaS, traditional vendors with sufficient economies of scale will not b...
Thomas W. Hall
Added 13 Dec 2010
Updated 13 Dec 2010
Type Journal
Year 2008
Where JSW
Authors Thomas W. Hall
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