In November 2014, we contacted a really interesting SaaS provider. Their service seemed to have many public requests for an on-premises version. Naturally, we wanted to work with them to increase their chances of a quick and successful production deployment. We were a perfect fit for them.
Unfortunately, they chose the “DIY” route, and still haven’t pushed their on-prem solution to production (9 months later).
Our premise is simple: We’ll get you to production in one week.
We build thousands of virtual appliances each month. That’s our specialty. This provides us with the ability to know the challenges of shipping a production-ready SaaS application, on-premises.
The main challenges can be split into two categories: business and technical.
Deciding to put your SaaS, on-premises, requires you to consider a new business model. In addition to selling your service for a monthly subscription fee, you’ll now sell a product (licensed) for a yearly one-time payment (renewable). Some companies also provide an additional monthly support subscription. This obviously allows you to charge more for your product, and generate considerably more revenue. On the other hand, you will now need to provide a much higher level of dedicated customer support, thus increasing your team size and expenses.
Another business challenge relates to sales. Since your customers will mostly be businesses and enterprises, you will need a sales person or sales team to handle your prospects and lead to a final sale. This also equates to increased costs, but potentially increased sales.
Finally, marketing an on-premises product is different from a SaaS, so you’ll need to modify or create new marketing materials. This will also incur more costs, with the potential of increasing sales.
Here we list a few technical challenges of placing your SaaS, on-premises.
The questions, how do you:
Our question for you: Is that your core expertise?
We could give you a set of tools and some guidelines on doing it yourself, but that won’t take you to production very quickly (we estimate 1 year to production). Over the last few years, we’ve accumulated massive amounts of knowledge and experience to answer ALL those questions.
In fact, it’s our core expertise!
We initially built Jidoteki to solve some of those technical challenges, but we realize many challenges require custom work.
That’s where our managed service comes in. Contact us, and we’ll discuss your SaaS application, its architecture, stack, software dependencies and external third-party dependencies. We’ll design a way to get it all running on one virtual appliance, with the least amount of effort on your end.
We’ll essentially do all the work for you, because we can, and we’ll get you production-ready in just one week (usually one week, sometimes two). One thing to note is we won’t modify your application (source code). That’s entirely your responsibility, but we’ll provide some guidelines to help with that.
As usual, feel free to tweet or email us for advice and consulting, and for help building your on-premises virtual appliance.