As your software firm strives to build a pure SaaS delivery model with advance features and accelerated delivery times, you will likely encounter three major enablement challenges:
- Architecture Enablement: A multi-tenant architecture within a SaaS deployment provides a single version and configuration of the application that is used by all tenants, aka customers. Software providers can choose to implement multi-tenancy natively within their application or to use less disruptive techniques such as virtualization. Either way, this complex area represents significant risk for little differentiation. Other architecture enablement considerations include availability, performance, cost, security and compliance.
- Operational Enablement: Most software providers do not have the ability to build and operate a physical hosting platform in-house. Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offerings can accelerate the creation of new applications while Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offerings require less disruptive changes. In both cases, it makes sense for software providers to delegate the provisioning, operation, and management of the underlying platform. PaaS and IaaS providers also bring additional competencies to the table such as on managed services, ITSM and ITIL.
- Business Enablement: Service offerings are far more dynamic than traditional license models. They require frequent creation of new pricing models, discounting schemes, and loyalty programs to monetize the offerings and bring them to market sooner and profitably. The ability to source services from partners frees software providers from the risk and complexity of building and supporting such bespoke and non-differentiating services for themselves.
Each of these enablement challenges can be best addressed with support from a leading SaaS platform partner that specializes in collaborating with software providers. Working with such a platform provider allows software providers to take responsibility only for the application itself—which after all is their core competency.
To find out how Logicalis can help your organization ensure your SaaS platform leverages the cloud to increase revenues, improve margins and enhance customer experiences, visit http://www.us.logicalis.com/microsites/cisco-isv/.