There are many reasons that buyers look toward vendors that provide services in a hosted, software as a service model. The arguement goes that on premise software involves investing in the management of technology, product licenses, application development, data centers, servers and so on. Theoretically at least, such elements can be a big distraction for your day to day business. But if you are looking at SaaS options for Web Content Management, then you should know that there are some special implications that you should be aware of when  evaluating potential suppliers.

For example in many WCM situations, you will need to publish from one environment to another, such as editorial to live, or from staging to production. Often times, these environments differ significantly, both physically as well as logically. Yet many suppliers who say they provide a SaaS based WCM solution, in fact only provide a solution  for the management and not for the delivery of content.

While this  kind of a decoupled approach for management and delivery can have its own advantages, what this means for you in practical terms, is that you will need to invest in a delivery environment yourself, one that is separate from your vendor's SaaS environment. So you will have to have servers, resources, expertise and all the other things that you actually wanted to stay away from in the first place when you decided to go with a SaaS based solution. You could of course hire another supplier to provide the delivery environment, but then you will end up managing multiple vendors along with the challenges of ensuring their technologies are compatible.

So if you are considering a SaaS based solution, evaluate  carefully how much of your overall solution is SaaS-able. As a result you may also need to then decide whether you are comfortable in managing the non SaaS part of the end solution on your own.