How agencies will be transformed by SaaS

As the 23rd Annual South by Southwest (SXSW) Festival wound down yesterday, visitors to the Austin, TX festival are reflecting on the outstanding selection of panels, talks, and presentations from world-renowned keynote speakers.

One that we’ve been reflecting on quite a bit came from Cory Clarke of VSA Partners who presented on “Software as an Agency.” Clarke illustrated the ways in which agencies can leverage Software as a Service technology to encapsulate their unique approach to advertising, marketing, and branding.

SaaS enables agencies to present their traditional offerings as consumables for use by other businesses in the development of custom applications – thereby extending their business services, creating new efficiencies, and building and developing their competitive advantage.

There is a huge “opportunity for technology to transform the agency business,” said Clarke. “Essentially, our work product has changed radically since the tech boom of the 90s, but our actual operating model hasn’t transformed with it. There is an opportunity for a new type of agency.”

And there is a good reason Clarke found so much transformative potential in Software as a Service (or, SaaS). The term SaaS is used to describe the cloud-based delivery of software, and its associated data – in essence, software that is hosted remotely. SaaS solutions promote immediate customization and collaboration between entities or locations, by enabling user access through a web browser client.

More flexible and accessible than traditional applications, SaaS enables agile software development, reducing IT maintenance and costs, and offering many benefits to the day-to-day operation of businesses – with very few drawbacks or limitations.

Using SaaS to send large video files and final creatives to clients

As a leading provider of cutting-edge software solutions, Signiant has embraced cloud-based technology and developed the first SaaS solutions intended for high-speed transfer and storage of large unstructured data sets like video files – without sacrificing data protection.

In fact, we take every precaution to ensure that our technology and implementation processes meet rigorous third-party security standards. Our SaaS solutions use standards-based security technology to enable advanced authentication and secure data transfer, while maintaining the integrity and confidentiality of our clients’ data.

Both Media Shuttle and Signiant Flight were designed as SaaS – and intended to provide our clients the best solution for accelerated, secure movement of large digital assets. Our solutions offer the utmost in flexibility – allowing users to choose between on-premise or cloud data storage – within one affordable, scalable, reliable solution. Many digital agencies that incorporate high resolution video production into their client services are looking to Signiant’s solutions to send large video files over the internet, both between editors and for final delivery to their clients.

Tired of relying on outdated technology like FTP or shipping hard drives, many agencies’ first really transformative experience with SaaS is how they deliver their own services using ours. Media Shuttle in particular provides a ‘white glove’ experience for clients with a simple and elegant way to receive final creatives, no matter how large the files are and where in the world they are destined to go.