We are pleased to welcome back guest blogger Dani Shomron, a SAAS industry veteran. Dani has held development, management and executive roles in multiple verticles and geographies. He holds a BSc. in Computer Science from the Hebrew University and an MSc. in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Edinburgh. Dani is an expert in SaaS Operations and ISVs transition from on-site to on-demand.
“When you look at yourself from a universal standpoint, something inside always reminds or informs you that there are bigger and better things to worry about”. (Albert Einstein)
The trick is focusing on what you do best. This is a well known truism and it is the premise for SaaS. Beyond the cost savings - opex vs. capex and all that – the reason SaaS is such a successful model is that it allows the enterprise to focus on its competitive advantage and leave the rest to be handled by a competent service provider.
What is true for the enterprise should be true for the SaaS ISV. And if you look around, you will notice that most SaaS providers are also SaaS consumers. From CRM to Marketing generation, to financials, to you-name-it – SaaS companies are adopters of SaaS technology. (Of course most SaaS companies are even greater adopters of open source; hey, it’s free!).
Still, most on-demand providers are running their own data centers, the network, the servers, the storage, and I would dare to say, not excelling in that department. SaaS technologists are product people. Innovative, creative, not harnessed by process or procedure. The typical data center is a product of evolution gone haywire. You start up with a couple of servers, and slowly build up, slapping a switch here, a database there, buying a cheap router, until it becomes quite unmanageable. And they probably do not have the right staff to design and maintain the infrastructure.
SaaS companies are finding it hard to let go of their infrastructure assets, but more and more are realizing that they simply suck at the job. Especially if they are big enough for it to matter, but too small to do a good job.
Networking, hosting, storage and server management have become a commodity. And as such, shouldn’t you let someone else do the job?
Enter the managed service providers. They will take care of every tier that you will allow them access to. From hosting, to networking, servers, storage, database monitoring and management, and many are interested in taking over the application management, if you just let them. It is the next tier and probably most lucrative.
This is the point where the guy with the funny pajamas, pointed ears and the cape appears in a flash and says “enough!’
Nobody does it better than you (the SaaS ISV). Your application will never become a commodity. You built the app, you know it intimately, understand the domain and can react quickly when something goes awry.
You should build your operations team around application and domain expertise, not around networking or server configuration. And you should equip your ops team with the tools to monitor and manage the application. This includes instrumentation, end-user-experience monitoring and application management automation.
The domain of infrastructure management tools is so well developed, with so many solutions abound, that SaaS operations usually tend to invest there and not where it matters most – the application.
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Nolio Application Service Automation is a software platform for designing and executing automated application service workflows across the data center, enabling reliable, effective processes for the management of application change.
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