Software products have come a long way from being offered on a standalone desktop to ones that can be accessed from anywhere on the web. Unique software offerings have been made possible because of this Software as a Service (SaaS) business model. SaaS not only reduces the infrastructure investments from end user environment, but also opens up new and recurring revenue streams for ISVs. |
Embracing SaaS business model requires careful planning & execution. Whether you are contemplating moving your existing product offerings to leverage benefits of SaaS or building a business around SaaS, the experts from our SaaS Center Of Excellence can help you with your SaaS strategy giving due consideration for:
|
| |
 |
Tenancy partitioning (User Control) |
|
A single tenant application generally has no provision of serving multiple customers. Also, execution may not be partitioned, so situations may arise where inadvertent state sharing occurs between tenants that otherwise should have been isolated from one another. SaaS platforms are responsible for providing multi-tenancy aspects when needed. |
|
| |
|
Integration infrastructure |
|
Ability to integrate with existing platforms that users use gives an added benefit to the SaaS platform. Following open sources standards or evolving such mutually beneficial understanding among important vendors in your space of offering will allow for true mobility to the end user. This would lead to ready acceptance of your platform. You may also want to expose your platform to developers for integration via web services, etc. |
|
| |
|
Pricing (usage mode or feature access mode) |
|
“Features” are the commodities that the SaaS vendors sell. You should think of the offering as a set of features, be able to bundle them, create specials if required of it to advertise the well positioned services accordingly. Product managers can prioritize features for competitive reasons and price it to maximize revenues. |
|
| |
|
Billing |
|
A SaaS application should be able to create invoices based on customer order and billing cycles. Billing system that makes it possible for corporate customers to sign up and manage the billing process online, and view performance metrics are preferred. Billing can be done based on time spent by the user on the application, by the number of users, or by feature access program. |
|
| |
|
Reliability |
|
Web systems are reliable enough but not entirely immune to outages. Depending on the criticality of the SaaS application to the business, your solution should address this aspect of operation under reduced connectivity or total connectivity breakdown. |
|
| |
|
Data storage and security |
|
SaaS applications purposefully aggregate demand from all customers and users to one physical or virtual location, due to this it is important that data exclusivity is maintained. |
|
|
| |
|
Scalability |
|
Being a hosted solution, SaaS applications generally will have higher user load to handle and to ensure that the services are rendered without a drop in the throughput or service levels. ISVs may have to negotiate and commit on a SLAs with the customer for the same. Scalability is added through a multi-tier architecture supporting a load-balanced farm of identical application instances. |
|
Ideavate's Software as a Service (SaaS) Framework |
| |
|
|
Vendor lock-in |
|
'Vendor lock-in', is often cited as an adoption barrier for SaaS. The current industry lacks portability and interoperability between vendors. This means that to change from one vendor to another will take a considerable amount of effort and time. You can offset this by following open standards or evolve such understanding between the important vendors in your space of offering to allow for true mobility. Your users actually may look up to you for constant up-gradations and improvements. |
|
|
|
PDA & Mobility |
|
Given our experience & expertise developing and deploying both SaaS solutions and handheld devices applications, we can enable you to extend your SaaS offering on PDA and mobility devices as well. |
|
|
|
