Technology Focus Part 1 To Host or Not To Host?

The financial aspects of a hosted solution can be finessed in that fashion, but there's a second and even more problematic issue for a substantial number of catalogers and e-commerce companies: If you need a highly customized system, SaaS may not make much sense.

One Size Fits All

To be sure, you can have software vendors customize a solution for you and host it at their site just for you, providing access to your users via Web browsers. But this one-off approach isn't what most vendors have in mind when they talk about a hosted solution, although it's exactly what an ASP is all about. SaaS presupposes that while the system may offer a vast array of options, the combination of options you choose to use will be those available in the standard solution.