This is the fourth article in a series with excerpts from this year’s workshop titled, “How to Eat an Elephant – Developing a Real-World Product SaaS Product Roadmap.” Each of these articles will cover one part of core subjects in our Cloud Product Roadmap.  If you are just joining us – you can return to the first article in the series and find out more about the workshop background and other articles in the series.

Excerpt: How to Eat an Elephant Workshop by Scio Consulting

Planning and developing a Cloud product can be a daunting prospect, especially if using cloud-based infrastructure and services requires a departure from your “comfort zone” in more traditional installed and server-based products. One of the biggest concerns is developing the architecture for the project. For an implementation on something like Amazon Web Services how do you decide on the break-down of the application between the various services Amazon provides? Can you model the utilization scenarios and understand your costs in different situations?

Before you begin that consideration – let’s first make it clear that straightforward server virtualization is not the key feature of Cloud technology. Where Cloud implementations really shine in their value is in the ability to provide highly elastic capacity for specific application elements. This means the architecture can to break out client service elements that are based on utilizing elastic storage, moving large amounts of content, or have bursty characteristics.  Simple server virtualization schemes are limited reaching these scenarios economically because they are based on replicating a the server footprint rather than extending individual application  components.

On the other side of the coin, the “client side” of the application is not the only thing we’re concerned about. We also need to consider an operational side of the application that will support our product strategy and business model.  Hobbling operations by relying on manual processes to onboard customers and handle operations is not a sustainable way of dealing with the “back office details” of the service.  Generally, the operational side of an application will scale in a linear fashion. These components will scale in relation to the number of clients rather the usage patterns of application features by clients. That means utilizing different scaling strategies for various parts of the application. It also means cost modeling needs to be split between dynamic services that are consumed directly by client use and the more linear use patterns of components that are required to operate the service.

To understand the issues, let’s go back to one of the basic problems of a SaaS or Cloud product. There are several elements of these applications that are critical to operations but take considerable effort to plan, develop and implement:

• Multi-Tenancy – For most SaaS and Cloud Services, multi-tenancy is the core approach to application management, generating new instances, and structuring client data. Multi-tenancy is implemented in the database of the application itself.
• Application Management and Availability – Regardless of whether they are designed for the Cloud or not, modern applications are not monolithic. As we have discussed, they are actually a group of components that may have different use patterns and performance characteristics. Managing performance and scaling for the entire application is a basic requirement, but in a component model, you may need to manage performance and response at the component level to leverage the opportunities that true Cloud architecture offers.
• Product Management – Configuration, metering and billing are necessary to manage service packages that can be offered to clients. It is likely your packages will change over time, so your management system needs to be flexible and accept a wide range of scenarios. If you plan to leverage reporting to determine feature acceptance and value, you also need to be able to monitor feature-level usage over time.
• Usage Metering & Billing – If your service has usage-based billing, no matter how it works, you need some way to translate usage into billing. What seems simple can be come complicated quickly when you are faced with various combinations of partial months, changing user counts, differential pricing by user role, promotions, and other unexpected complications. Being able to respond to a changing elastic deployment. It requires much more effort to maintain reliability over changes to the core and operational sides of the application. In the best case, the basic architecture of the application platform supports the kind of load-balancing and instance version control that makes this possible.
• Subscription Management – A subscription is the package of services that a client has subscribed to and pays for in regular periods.  Although they are utility-based, very few Cloud Services can adopt a totally unpackaged, spot use model.  Granular spot use models are hard for the client to plan for because they can represent a risky “uncapped expense.”  And – unless they are based in regular use by a very large client base, they can result in a cash flow that is impossible to plan on. Because of this, regardless of how the service works, most SaaS and Cloud Services will have subscription-based packages and require on-going subscription management and the ability for clients to change subscriptions based on the current feature pricing schema.
• Access Control – Users must be able to access the features related to their role within their company subscription and if the service includes a suite of applications – their access needs to reflect their participation in the suite.
• Customer On-Boarding and Provisioning – When a customer signs up and is accepted, the application should be able to use the information provided at signup to provision a client instance and provide the necessary credentials, roles and access needed to the customer without any manual intervention or coding.
• Service Management and Configuration – When web services are used to provide the different components of an application, each service needs to be managed, versions need to be tracked and dependancies need to be respected. Without a management tool, this work needs to be done manually and can greatly complicate the job of managing new component rollouts.
• Contextual Logging – All servers and applications provide some level of logging – but if there is no mechanism to tie log information to users, clients and features, it can require a lot of effort to track down issues. Some sort of contextual information attached to logs speeds support efforts and improves overall customer support and reliability.

Taken together, these features require considerable planning and development effort to implement. They are not part of the core product value a SaaS or Cloud Service delivers, but they make the difference between a business model that operates and scales successfully and one that becomes burdened by too much overhead to scale repeatedly and successfully across enough customers to reach profitability. As you can see, these components will technically scale in relation to the number of clients the service has, not the features in use by clients and users.

SaaSGrid is one of a relatively small number of middleware servers or platforms that vendors can build on to provide these operational features and it will run either directly on servers or as virtualized servers on a service like Amazon Webservices. In either a virtualized or “bare metal” installation, a tool like SaaSGrid can lower the effort required to develop and implement a SaaS or Cloud product by as much as 60%.

So, when we get down to it – fully leveraging the capabilities of the Cloud for an application means understanding component-based architecture, the expected scaling characteristics and use patterns of each component, and finally the “orchestration” or web services messaging that allows all the components to act transparently across many clients as one application. On the business side, all of these elements have to be packaged and modeled to develop client offerings that have prices aligned to value and use. And – building a SaaS or Cloud product means planning for both client and operational functionality.

<Read the previous article in the series<

Do you need to know more about developing SaaS and Cloud Services to develop your application and business model? You should consider joining us at:

How To Eat An Elephant

Developing a Real-World 
SaaS Product Roadmap

28th April 2011

from 8:30 am to 1:30 pm
  (including breaks)

The Venue

Embassy Suites – Southeast

7525 East Hampden Avenue

Denver, Colorado

Prices

• How to Eat an Elephant Workshop – Standard price – $499
• Register NOW for our Denver Workshop and take advantage of our Apprenda-SaaSGrid Special Price
  

Agenda

• The Business Case for the Cloud - Assess if the Cloud is for you by identifying the business opportunity, investment needs, risks, etc.
• SaaS/Cloud Product Strategy – Define the competitive and positioning strategy for your product within your context and your market.
• Your Cloud Business Model - Define how your product will make money and what is needed to make it happen.
Developing your SaaS/Cloud Product Roadmap – Develop a tactical roadmap to align funding, development and marketing objectives.
• Key Technical & Functional Requirements of a SaaS/Cloud Product – Understand the architecture and functional elements required to deliver your service smoothly and profitably
• Cloud Readiness Checklist – Identify key requirements of SaaS and Cloud operations, customer support, legal, financial considerations, sales and marketing that you will need to prepare for to make your product successful.

You can take the workshop by itself or in conjunction with

SaaS University

THE Industry’s Most Comprehensive Cloud Application Conference

At the Embassy Suites, Southeast – Denver, Colorado – April 26th to 28th 2011

Prices

• SaaS University Package – Regular Admission – $999
• SaaS University Early Birds – $799 (Early Bird Registrations On April 15, 2011)

Get an additional discount from Scio – Regardless of when you register

• Because we are participating in this event, you can get an additional $150 off your registration.
• Just enter the Scio’s Discount Code: SCIOsave150 when registering for SaaS University.

Go to SaaS University Denver Registration Page

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