Spend Less Now and Later, Without Comprimise

The SaaS model requires the software provider to assume the entire operational expense of delivering their application. These infrastructure, bandwidth and personnel costs used to be borne by the customer when the software was installed on-premises. In order to avoid run-away cost and significant engineering problems over the long term it is necessary to have a robust platform underneath the actual application, to handle the complex architecture, business and operational requirements inherent to the SaaS delivery model.

Building out these critical underpinnings necessary to the SaaS model is a serious undertaking, and turns into an ongoing maintenance burden thereafter.

Leading SaaS vendors have sunk many man-years of effort and millions of dollars into building out these capabilities in order to bring their applications to market. Having a comprehensive and robust platform is absolutely critical to achieving the efficiency and economies of scale necessary for success in the cloud. SaaSGrid provides this platform to leading ISV’s and enterprises at a fraction of the cost of building it out on their own, with far more operational capability and no vendor lock-in.

Managing SaaS R&D Costs - 3 Paths to Choose

AVOIDANCE - Avoid architecting for SaaS altogether by simply using a virtualization strategy

• While this option lowers the initial R&D hurdle and can bring an application to market quickly, it leads to long term inefficiency and huge cost issues as the customer base scales. This is the technique used by the “Application Service Providers (ASPs)” of the ‘90s and led to the nearly complete extinction of that industry due to the high operating cost, low flexibility and massive management overhead of the model.

BUILD - Build out your own platform for SaaS delivery of your application

• This path has been achieved by many of the front-running software vendors to move into the SaaS space, however it requires significant upfront investment in building out a long list of complex functionality and capabilities and ultimately leaves the owner with an ongoing codebase to maintain, extend and support that is non-core to their actual business.

BUY - Leverage the industry’s leading purpose built applications server for SaaS offerings – Apprenda’s SaaSGrid

• The buy option provides the best of both worlds as it lowers the initial cost and technology development hurdle in getting to market and provides the most efficient cost profile over the long term. Furthermore, by leveraging a third party purpose built technology for the foundation, developers receive a much more robust set of capabilities with ongoing support and maintenance that requires zero effort.