The more familiar you become with the low-cost, feature-rich capabilities inherent in today’s software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings, the more likely you are to join your peers – many of whom are also your competitors – in their quest to acquire these capabilities from SaaS partners for less than they could ever build them for in house. The fact is, as SaaS applications continue to take on more complex and critical services, they validate the efficiencies that are possible within the expanding interconnected digital universe becoming known as “web-scale IT.”
Web-scale IT is essentially a software delivery marketplace that has no boundaries, creating a delivery network that can be personal, local and global all at the same time. Sounds great, doesn’t it? It is, but there is a catch … you have to jump through a number of technological hurdles before you are ready to reap the rewards that this emerging delivery network has to offer.
Starting now is the key: To stay ahead of your competition in the years ahead, you need to be actively checking off accomplishments on a list of IT capabilities that are considered prerequisites for success in this growing, changing marketplace.
- DevOps: Encouraging development and operations teams to accomplish continuous delivery of software.
- ITSM: Ensuring your procedures and processes align your technology with your business objectives.
- Automation: Building efficiencies into processes and, among other functions, ensuring that all hand-offs between developers and operations are consistent and reliable.
- Infrastructure monitoring and management: Giving your company visibility into its own distributed infrastructure so you can manage test-dev and production environments as well as your customers’ cloud containers.
- Security monitoring and management: Helping your team monitor threat activity effectively, respond appropriately and learn how to better defend against threats in the future.
- Interoperability: Integrating your applications with other applications/modules (like data analytics) on multiple cloud and on-premise infrastructures.
- Portability: Allowing applications to run on more than one cloud platform, freeing you to pursue the best prices and features regardless of platform requirements, something which can be a very complex and long-term undertaking.
Admittedly, this is a lot to accomplish while at the same time producing killer apps with imminent scalability, global scope, and innovative features that excite customers and deflate the competition. Just knowing what is possible on the other side, however, is compelling enough to push savvy software providers forward in their quest for competitive advantage.
Need help deciding where to start? Download a white paper, “The Future of SaaS… and the Competitive Advantages for ISVs Who Get There First.” Then, watch a brief video that explains how Logicalis helps ISVs transform their businesses, and explore Logicalis’ ISV web site to see how embracing the cloud and a SaaS delivery model can increase your bottom line.