Intelligent CIO Africa Issue 02 | Page 11

LATEST INTELLIGENCE

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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