Don't Fear SaaS
We are in the world of connected services, always online, always available. In this world, many software options are available online—you just need to connect these Software as a Service (SaaS) offerings into your solution.
Software as a Service enables and empowers you. It allows a team of experts to focus on what they do well--maintain their own software for you, so you can have time to use that software to help your organization.
Yet many people in Technology look at SaaS as a competitor to their own job, and it doesn't have to be that way. If you were considering getting a car, would you start with an ironworks foundry so you could forge your own engine, build your own frame, and ultimately craft your own vehicle?
More likely, you would instead go and buy a car that comes from a factory, because you have better things to do with your time.
With a SaaS solution you are given back your valuable time that is being lost on the efforts that other people have already build and made, so you can focus on helping your organization meet its own needs.
At one point in time owning a vehicle meant knowing everything about how the vehicle operated. I recall a story about a father in the early 1900's who's vehicle broke down on a family road trip. He was able to open the engine and repair a piston gasket--performing all of this work on the side of the road, and soon after the fix was completed they continued on their journey.
Just as that expectation of vehicle maintenance is a bygone era--the world simply does not expect all car owners to be able to make their own roadside engine repairs--the same is true of the enterprise software industry. There is no reason to continue the dated expectation of full service vehicle repair yourself. SaaS software is the logical maturity of the industry, enabling you to use your tools, instead of having to spend all of your time maintaining them.