SaaS Frequently Asked Questions

• What are the key benefits of SaaS?

  • Simpler user experience: From ease of licensing to collaborating confidently on the latest version to frequent software updates, users have less headaches with SaaS.
    
    
  • Flexible collaboration: Distributed teams can better collaborate on projects, documents, and designs in real-time, changing the way organizations share knowledge and innovate.
    
    
  • Accelerated innovation: Users have access to the most current version of the software. Enhancements are often automatic and are regularly deployed so users have access to the most innovative functionality.
    
    
  • Availability and mobility: With a SaaS solution, everything is in the cloud. Access your applications and data from anywhere and with any internet-connected device. Your team can be local, distributed, and highly mobile all at the same time while continuing to execute tasks quickly and efficiently.
    
    
  • Lower total cost of ownership: Businesses avoid the costly IT operations, infrastructure, and data centers currently required to support on-premises software or private cloud deployment.
    
    
  • Secure and Scalable: Scaling software capabilities to meet shifting business demand becomes effortless and effectively limitless, and users can be confident that a highly certified and regularly audited expert cybersecurity organization is ensuring the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of their data.

  
  

• Why enterprise SaaS and why now?

  SaaS is the delivery method of choice for enterprise solutions. Gartner data shows software and SaaS as the fastest-growing segment in IT in 2022 and anticipated 11.8% growth in 2023, far outpacing any other IT spending category.

  SaaS is uniquely suited to meets the needs of a changing workforce that includes global and remote employees, who can all be connected through powerful software. It supports stronger communication and greater visibility across teams, as well as delivering the most innovative, up-to-date software functions (including improved cybersecurity). A recent survey shows 79% consider SaaS as an important part of digital transformation. For manufacturing and industrial software, which has been slower to transition to SaaS, the tide is shifting. The same survey found more than half would consider SaaS solutions for CAD and PLM.

  
  

• What is the difference between enterprise SaaS and B2B SaaS?

  B2B SaaS is a more general term for software designed to support businesses. Enterprise SaaS is specific to software designed for large, global organizations. As we described above, enterprise SaaS solutions have the scale and complexity to meet the needs of a larger business with more employees; things like role-specific permissions and greater computing power.

• What makes PTC’s SaaS offerings unique?

  All PTC software is sold on a subscription basis and many of PTC offerings are available in the cloud, including Vuforia, ThingWorx, and Windchill, which was the industry’s first web-based PLM solution.

  Over the past few years, PTC has been steadily working toward transitioning our product portfolio to include SaaS offerings. Within PTC’s SaaS portfolio is Onshape – a highly differentiated, cloud-native product development solution that enables companies to dramatically transform their product development processes – and Arena, the leader in cloud–native PLM and QMS. Leveraging cloud-native technology, Onshape and Arena streamline enterprise collaboration between dispersed product teams and supply chains.

  Newer SaaS additions to PTC include Codebeamer and ServiceMax, as well as Windchill+ and Kepware+.

  As a leader in SaaS for industrial applications, PTC plans to introduce additional “Plus” products built on its Atlas SaaS platform in the coming years.

  
  

• What is PTC Atlas?

  PTC Atlas is our foundational SaaS technology. Atlas supports the needs of modern work: flexible collaboration between colleagues, faster innovation for your products or processes, and secure and scalable digital transformation solutions, all at a lower cost of ownership.

  It delivers a powerful set of core services that can be used to facilitate many SaaS applications. These core platform services include user provisioning, data management, data translation, cloud deployment and management tools, analytics services, and many other core elements of modern powerful SaaS applications.

  As the technical home of PTC’s SaaS future, Atlas will enable a consistent and improved user experience across our portfolio.

• What is the history of SaaS?

  Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) has been an established business model since the 1960s, although it has greatly evolved since then.

  Back then, for the average business, computers were too expensive and too large, but the technology was there and developing rapidly. To take advantage, the idea of a "compatible time-sharing system" emerged; businesses could log into a mainframe server and leverage simple applications and storage. It was the first form of SaaS and it continued to be adopted over the next two decades.

  As desktop computers became smaller and cheaper, they became and more ubiquitous in the workplace and home. Companies in agreements with early software providers could have new versions of the software mailed to them and manually install it on the office computers. There was a growing challenge though; storage space was limited on these computers and the software took up a lot of that memory.

  In the mid-1990s, the World Wide Web changed the world as we know it. Through the internet, companies could access cloud-based solutions to run their business. Core business apps began transitioning to SaaS-based solutions. Ecommerce boomed in the late 90s. With software hosted elsewhere, the storage issue was alleviated.

  Salesforce is credited as the first modern pure SaaS company when it debuted in 1999. It was the first company to offer its product as SaaS from the start. Over the next two-plus decades, SaaS has transformed how we work, how we entertain ourselves, and how we communicate.

  One area where SaaS has not been prevalent—until fairly recently—is in industrial applications, specifically for product development. The large files and data management necessary for CAD and PLM as well as concerns over intellectual property and security have largely kept that type of software in on-premises configurations. With the rise of cloud computing, and the computing processing power that goes with it, product development software is beginning to make the switch to SaaS.