I would think it's the opposite: for a small-to-medium shop it makes all kinds of sense to concentrate on your core (design, animation, client development) and

I would think it's the opposite: for a small-to-medium shop it makes all kinds of sense to concentrate on your core (design, animation, client development) and just rent "rendering as a service". a) If you have a small headcount, a dedicated server wrangler's salary would be better used to pay for a person with a more product-oriented profile. That's what makes the difference between you and your competition: you aren't writing your own renderers anyway. b) When maintaining your own serverfarm it can be difficult for you to have the jobs pipeline full at all times, and you can either have a lot of spare capacity sitting around between jobs, or need more horsepower during peaks. c) This also allows small-to-medium shops to tackle problems bigger than they could otherwise from a pure cashflow point of view. If you are renting rendering-as-a-service, your clients are paying for the hardware their jobs need, no need to invest, amortize, etc. Just pay an invoice coming in and an cash an invoice going out. It seems to me that these are exactly the kind of problems SaaS is designed to solve, and that small-to-medium shops can benefit from this solution more than big studios who can: a) amortize their server wranglers over bigger installations, so their sysadmin/creative ratio is lower. b) keep the rendering farm working efficiently, or even rent it out if they have lulls in work. c) afford big financial investments.