For ISVs with well-established, multi-tenant SaaS environments, automation and orchestration present prime opportunities to fine-tune their SaaS platform. By relying on automation and orchestration, ISVs not only avoid the cost of adding additional resources to deploy, manage and support applications they provision through the SaaS model, they also accelerate customer access and time-to-revenue. ISVs can also eliminate the element of human error, which further delays the time to deploy and roll out updates.
An effective set of automation and orchestration best practices should be based on the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) approach, which also helps ISVs develop a comprehensive IT Service Management (ITSM) strategy to ensure the SaaS model meets customer needs. The ITSM components to define include a service catalog as well as incident, problem, and change procedures along with a configuration-management database. Once you define the components, automation and orchestration will help you provide an effective way to apply them consistently.
Start by automating the most basic and repeatable tasks. This will lead to predictable results and faster time-to-value—for both you and your customers. The next step is orchestration—coordinating all the automated tasks so they function cohesively and each task can benefit fully from the output of all other tasks.
By relying on automation and orchestration, ISVs can accelerate the many manual, tedious, and error-prone tasks relating to software deployments and upgrades on their SaaS platform. Orchestration also enables insight into how well your interconnected automated processes function. You may discover it’s possible to further accelerate roll-outs and upgrades to your SaaS platform.
To find how Logicalis can help your ISV organization leverage automation and orchestration so your SaaS-delivery model increases revenues, improves margins and enhances customer experiences, visit http://www.hcisv.com/.