Research On The Pricing Strategy And The Business Model Of SaaS

In recent years, software as a service(SaaS) has seeded a new wave for software industry in China,the trend of software service has been widely recognized by the industry. SaaS has certain commonness with traditional information products and information services, which has its own distinct characteristics because of changes in historical backgrounds, cultural traditions, network technology and economic environment. After understanding the industry chain of the SaaS Business Model, SaaS venders should make and adopt the effective Pricing Strategy to expand the market share of SaaS, and consolidate the position in the market and enhance their own competitive power. How to combine the characteristics of SaaS, SaaS consumer behavior and the information economy environment to analyse the Business Model and Pricing Strategy of SaaS is the current theoretical research hotspots.Firstly, this paper discusses the characteristics and the concept of SaaS, and analyzes the theory of the information services and the information product pricing, then it focuses on discussing the Business Model and the Pricing Strategy of SaaS. SaaS is delivered through the network, whicih runs based on a large and complex industrial chain, the relationship among the members of the industrial chain is of mutual constraints and closely related. Therefore, the research in this paper on the SaaS Business Model focuses on the analysis of SaaS service manner, role distribution, billing methods, the related market subjects of SaaS Business Model, as well as many problems faced in the operation process of SaaS. There are ten main participants in the value realization process of SaaS.This paper deeply analyzes the relationship among those participants.The Pricing Strategy problem of SaaS needs to be resolved urgently. In this paper,various price factors are considerd, the total cost of ownership of the SaaS vendors or users are in-depth analyzed. On this basis, the paper focuses on discussing the market equilibrium pricing strategy of SaaS, and applies the relative theory to create the pricing model,which is based on the minimize value of the total cost of ownership and the maximize value of the expected utility about customers. Finally, this paper derives a viable range of pricing and pricing strategy for SaaS venders.