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SaaS is a great business model for Entrepreneurs - Alpha Anywhere


U.S. Entrepreneurship Hits Record High


A report issued last week by Babson and Baruch Colleges points to an exciting trend in the U.S. economy: The percentage of adults involved in startups in 2012 hit 13%–a record high since Babson began tracking entrepreneurship rates in 1999.

Better yet, the vast majority of these folks started businesses to pursue opportunity, rather than out of necessity. A whopping 43 percent of Americans believe there are good opportunities for entrepreneurship, up by more than 20 percent since 2011 and the highest level recorded in the history of the study, called the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor U.S. report.   For the full article click here

There is abundant evidence that SaaS (software as a service) is a great business model for entrepreneurs with domain experience in an industry/discipline or for people with software talents who can develop SaaS apps.


Gartner, is forecasting that next year the SaaS market will be $22 billion next year.http://www.information-age.com/technology/cloud-and-virtualisation/2095578/saas-will-be-$145bn-market-this-year---gartner


What is good for customers of SaaS



    • No installs - everything is run from your browser or mobile device from any location

    • No large upfront costs - typically you pay a monthly fee based on usage

    • Platform that the app is running on - normally the SaaS app provider will run the system on state of the art hardware on multiple servers to ensure high availability and to protect you from hardware malfunctions


 What is good for entrepreneurs



    • Global reach  - If you have built a good product and clearly defined your market, you can now sell your product to anyone on the planet (previously with packaged software, you were often limited to selling to a local prospect base because often you were limited to places where you could set up the hardware and install the software)

    • Support - Since everyone is running the same version of your software on a standardized browsers or mobile devices, support costs will be lower

    • Scale - Your business can grow by simply adding more server capacity


The key criteria for entrepreneurs when selecting a mobile and web SaaS development platform then become



    1. How quickly can I build the SaaS app to beat potential competitors to market and establish "first mover advantage?"

    1. What will it cost to build the app?

    1. Will the development environment I use have enough richness and power to build a great app and will it let me build with one code base and have the app adapt responsively for mobile devices and the web?

    1. How quickly can I update and enhance the app to maintain my position in the market and what are the associated costs for that development effort?

    1. Finally,  but also critical, what will the operating costs be in terms of hosting and licensing  to ensure that I have enough gross margin  to market my SaaS service effectively and still produce the levels of profits and cash flow that I want?


This is where Alpha Anywhere comes in.


It lets your build and modify your SaaS app extremely quickly because of its coding optional design. The reduced time gives you the benefits of lower development costs and being able to seize market opportunities in a timely fashion.

It saves you money because of its affordable licensing and hosting. This allows you to price your app at the right price for the market rather than being constrained by your operating costs.

More details are laid out in this table below highlighting important benefits that Alpha Anywhere offers to developers of business application and mobile/Web SaaS apps and why it meets the key criteria laid out about

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About Author

Richard Rabins
Richard Rabins

Co-founder of Alpha Software, Richard Rabins focuses on strategy, sales, and marketing. Richard also served as CEO of SoftQuad International from 1997 to 2001, when it owned Alpha. In addition to his 30 years with the company, Richard played a key role as co-founder, and served as president and chairman of the Massachusetts Software Council (now the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council), the largest technology trade organization in Massachusetts. Prior to founding Alpha, Richard was a project leader and consultant with Information Resources, Inc. (IRI), and a management consultant with Management Decision Systems, Inc. Richard holds a master's degree in system dynamics from the Sloan School at MIT, and a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering and master's degree in control engineering from University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. He has served on the boards of Silent Systems, Legacy Technology and O3B Networks, and is co-founder of Tubifi www.tubifi.com.

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The Alpha platform is the only unified mobile and web app development and deployment environment with distinct “no-code” and “low-code” components. Using the Alpha TransForm no-code product, business users and developers can take full advantage of all the capabilities of the smartphone to turn any form into a mobile app in minutes, and power users can add advanced app functionality with Alpha TransForm's built-in programming language. IT developers can use the Alpha Anywhere low-code environment to develop complex web or mobile business apps from scratch, integrate data with existing systems of record and workflows (including data collected via Alpha TransForm), and add additional security or authentication requirements to protect corporate data.

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