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How to Benchmark the Maturity of your SaaS Solution?

There are several strategies available for ISVs to build/migrate their products to a SaaS model. However, each approach has its own pros and cons. There are 2 broad approaches that ISVs typically take towards creating their SaaS solution,

• Single Tenant (or) Hosted Model
• Multi Tenant Model

While there are plenty of differences in the approach between these two models,

• Single tenant approach is mostly for products that are migrated from on-premise models to SaaS/cloud model (Read this blog for migration from single tenant to multi-tenant)
• Multi-tenant approach has become the defacto standard for all newly built SaaS solutions

A typical SaaS solution constitutes of 3 types of requirements Non-Functional Requirements, Product Requirements and Operational Requirements.

SaaS Solution

Alt text – SaaS Requirements

Product Requirements (has to) vary from product to product, and domain to domain. But, Non-Functional and Operational Requirements more or less remain the same. Your product can be benchmarked against the industry best practices defined in these areas.

In this blog series I will be discussing on how to objectively benchmark your SaaS solution with the industry best practices. I would like to categorize Non-Functional and Operational Requirements in to 4 segments as shown in the below picture.

Operations

Architecture – This segment will evaluate your SaaS solution against the architecture and design best practices that determine how well your SaaS product is designed for non-functional requirements. It also focuses on measuring your product from a maintainability perspective.

Security – Security continues to be the top most concern for SaaS adoption. In this segment we will be evaluating your SaaS solution against the security best practices concerning data security, access control, multi-tenancy, etc.

Operations – This segment captures all the operational aspects that are required to manage and service your SaaS solution. We will benchmark your SaaS solution against the best practices of managing a SaaS business.

Configuration – Configuration has become a mandatory for SaaS products particularly those that are delivered in a multi-tenant model, as a single code base has to serve for multiple customers (tenants). In this segment we will measure your SaaS solution’s configurability support for the common customization use cases in SaaS model.

We will be covering a detailed discussion on these 4 segments in the upcoming parts of this blog.

In the meantime, if you are interested to know more details about the bench-marking exercise you can download the following free tool offered by TechCello.

SMART Calculator – SaaS Maturity Assessment and Reporting Tool (SMART) helps you identify the maturity of your SaaS solution that you already have or plan to build. There are several ways to deliver a product in SaaS model, but how stable and sustainable is your solution? Given the very fact that SaaS is a volume game, scalability is the key for a successful SaaS business. SMART will help you find how scalable and matured is your product.

Click here to download the SMART calculator.

In case of any queries please feel free to contact me at janaki.j@techcello.com

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Janaki Jayachandran

Janaki serves as the Director of Technology at Techcello. Janaki has more than 15+ years of software development experience. He is responsible for product engineering, support and evangelization of Techcello. Prior to Techcello, Janaki worked with Aspire Systems as Delivery Manager and Practice Manager focused on Microsoft Technologies and SaaS/On-Demand product development. He has worked with several ISVs and enterprises in building multi-tenant, cloud enabled products. He has travelled widely across the US and UK for working with various customers. Janaki is an ardent cloud enthusiast and a prolific speaker at various cloud conferences including Interop, SaaS University, Cloud Connect and Euro Cloud.

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