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Enabling Agile SaaS Infrastructure
5 Principles that Enable Service Providers to Grow
It’ s no surprise that the Software-as-a-Service( SaaS) market is exploding; its benefits are evident and mounting. In fact, IDC predicts that the SaaS market will grow significantly by 2020. SaaS end users are reaping the benefits of greater software efficiency, agility, reduced operational headaches, and trading CapEx for OpEx. The SaaS model enables low cost to entry, scale, and no maintenance as opposed to traditional software which placed these burdens on the end user.
If customers turn to SaaS for efficient, agile, simple solutions, SaaS providers must demand the same from their infrastructure vendors. After all, SaaS providers aren’ t delivering just a product but a complete solution, and the ability to drive improved delivery, support, and maintenance at the infrastructure layer is critical.
SaaS companies have varied in size and success. Some like Salesforce and SurveyMonkey are native to this business and built to capitalize on the efficiencies of the SaaS infrastructures. Others like Microsoft or Tableau have adapted their business models as SaaS has matured and the industry faced massive digital disruption. By expanding into SaaS delivery, these companies have increased their sales by cross-selling and developing their traditional software into services complete with features like data storage( Microsoft) or data analytics tools( Tableau).
Today’ s service provider landscape is highly competitive, and to remain relevant in an evolving market, service providers must primarily focus on understanding their customers’ needs and then demonstrate their ability to fulfill them.
The rapid elasticity, high efficiency, and cost containment required by today’ s market is very difficult to achieve using traditional scale-up infrastructures. This need drives the innovation required to implement a web-scale next generation data center( wNGDC) architecture.
The architecture that service providers are migrating toward is based on five core principles that are implemented across each layer of the data center framework— affecting the software, processes, and people that support the entire delivery stack.
These five principles are summarized below, and once implemented, they can enable drastic change in a service provider’ s market penetration and profitability.
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