Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) hoping to adopt a Software as a Service (SaaS) model need to think through their requirements before rushing into anything.

That's according to a spokesperson for the IT company Dell, Bill Odell, who told Forbes.com what SMBs must consider before making their decision.

He explained that once they have decided to utilise SaaS, there are some "important questions" business leaders must asking themselves. Odell said: "There are thousands of SaaS applications on the market today. Which ones have the right features for your business? Which ones have the security and stability you need?

"How do you get started and what support should you expect? How do you pull all these solutions together, with your existing applications and make sure they support your business?"

Odell also went on to add that thinking about the integration and analytics potential of the SaaS system in question is vital too. In his opinion, SaaS models should be easy to implement, configuration should be simple and it should be accompanied by "out-of-the-box connectors".

"SMBs must ensure that they connect new SaaS applications to legacy systems," he advised.

Also cited by techme101.com, Odell did add that SaaS has become one of the world's "most popular" delivery systems for cloud integration, meaning that all of the necessary considerations shouldn't put SMBs off making this worthwhile investment.