Industry experts believe that cloud computing will become a $60 to $80 billion industry this year. According to Gartner Group, 78% of IT budgets are spent on maintaining existing systems and infrastructure, and only 22% on new capabilities. More and more businesses are turning to cloud computing to "outsource" many of their computing software and hardware needs. Today's customers' business IT concerns are concentrated on their return on investment (ROI), time-to-market, competitiveness and change management. With these challenges in mind the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model is highly appropriate, efficient, cost effective. SaaS facilitates better change management and lower total cost of ownership (TCO).

Mercati consults with our clients to successfully migrate their existing applications or create new ones on leading cloud computing platforms for high volume transactions, seamless data sizes, and optimizing response times. Our team will collaboratively review your existing IT systems, and devise the optimal solutions on how to meet your process and information objectives. Our cloud computing solutions are designed to help firms lower their capital and operating costs, accelerate time to market, and improve user experiences.

Mercati's SaaS consultation for software cloud firms includes:

• Product strategy
• Market & industry strategy
• Architecture consulting — gap analysis and re-engineering services
• Pricing strategy
• Roadmap planning
• Product design
• Competitive evaluation
• Competitive win-loss analysis
• Product positioning
• ROI analysis
• Experience design
• Usability evaluation
• Product launch planning
• Release process calibration/optimization
• Operation optimization
• Solutions architecture
• Platform and hardware scalability
• Security
• Application lifecycle management strategy

Mercati's SaaS consultation for companies looking to adopt a SaaS solution include:

• Advisory consulting
• Corporate adoption and rollout strategy
• Usability analysis when migrating to SaaS model
• Solution/vendor selection
• Service-oriented architecture (SOA) integration with existing systems
• Mapping and recommendation
• Implementation and testing
• Onboarding/training
• Maintenance