5 Tips for Building an Agile Infrastructure for Delivering SaaS

SaaS providers deciding whether to build their own infrastructure or use a public cloud provider have much to consider. These five tips might help.

Customer retention is as important as new customer acquisition. Because SaaS users aren’t invested in infrastructure and perpetual license outlays, their “switching cost” is low. As a result, SaaS vendors must provide consistently high customer experience in every area, including great uptime, superior application performance and general account management.

SaaS vendors must grow to succeed. Their business models are based on low barriers of entry—such as free trials—and network effects that deliver more value as user base grows. This means SaaS companies need infrastructure that scales easily as they add customers, users, devices and data growth.

SaaS solutions today are doing far more than just transactions—they need to include real-time analytics. The era when online analytic processing (OLAP) was a batch function performed by specialists with niche data warehouse tools is now giving way to SaaS solutions that embed personalization, intelligence and other analytics as part of the user experience.

The cost of application delivery infrastructure is effectively the cost of goods sold for a SaaS company. As a result, the ability to scale infrastructure in a cost-efficient way is vital to profitability.

Customers demand simplicity, transparency and predictability. Vendors, therefore, must design an infrastructure based on the same simplicity. Establishing relationships with technology vendors and system integrators that have a shared appreciation of simplicity will foster a technology culture that mirrors the same values and result in a more agile, capable offering to customers.