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2019 Buyer's Guide to Accounting and Financial So ware 4 Your First Decision Choosing a So ware Delivery Model If you are considering a new financial management system, there's one decision you can and should make early on. Which delivery model will provide the highest ROI for your organization? Here's a high-level overview to help you understand your three main options, followed by a chart with more details� On-premises solutions. With this traditional model, you license so ware and run it on your own servers. When considering this model, be sure to account for the capital and operating expenses associated with deployment, operations, support, customization, integration, maintenance, and upgrades. While these costs can be too great for small and mid-sized organizations to sustain, on premises solutions remain a viable option for some larger companies. These organizations o en have a built-out IT infrastructure, investment capital, and expertise to support and maintain major so ware applications. Hosted solutions (single tenant). In a hosted environment, the so ware physically resides at a remote data center operated by an expert third-party hosting provider. Your team would usually use a product like Citrix to access the so ware over the Internet and see the screens being generated at the hosting provider. This model eliminates the responsibility of maintaining hardware infrastructure, and therefore can help you avoid large upfront capital expenditures. But it works by providing you with a unique "instance" of your financial system on a dedicated server. That means you would still face the same costs for customizations, upgrades, integration, and support and service. Cloud computing solutions (multi-tenant). Just like Google, Amazon, and online banking, cloud-based financial applications were built for the Internet age. Also known as "so ware as a service" (SaaS), these applications offer direct, always-on access to the solution, typically paid for on a per-user/per-month subscription basis. They are multi tenant, which means you can unlock only your own data, but you work from a shared system—a single set of resources, application infrastructure, and database. There are no upfront fees, capital investments, or long-term commitments because you do not buy, license, or manage the underlying hardware, so ware, or networking infrastructure. Upgrades are performed at no cost to you� Even if you make extensive changes to the system, your customizations "roll over" to work with the new upgrade. Just like Google, Amazon, and online banking, cloud-based financial applications were built for the Internet age.