THE STORY OF MOVING TO A SAAS MODEL, CLOUD HOSTED PRODUCT, WITH A NEW WEB UI, while maintaining profitability.
Background
We have an Enterprise desktop product. We kept adding features, fixing bugs and getting more clients and adaptation across the board. The product got better, deeper and more robust. We were doing waterfall development with big high-stress releases a few times a year.
Challenge
From a technical point of view, the product and our processes had their limitations – the look and feel wasn’t very modern and we felt like we could do much more for our users and their network. From a commercial point of view, SaaS is the future and we knew we wanted to be proactive about going there.
Solution
We've indeed decided we want to host the product and switch to SaaS. From a product standpoint we knew this will give us the tools and capabilities we never had on-premise.
Journey
First we asked ourselves whats does that mean. Most basically, we could just put the software on a server and give the user an Remote Desktop connection. That’s actually how we started – it was a great step forward. But that wasn’t the great leap we were hoping to take.
We've realized we need to better define where we want to go in order for us to get there. We wanted a SaaS product with a web interface that we can leverage as a platform and potential network for our users. It needs to be fast, flexible, extensible, globally accessible and scalable. That meant a lot of changes and new exciting initiatives:
Automated deployment
Changing our Agile approach
An infrastructure team responsible for deployment and architecture
A web front-end
An optimized services architecture
A roadmap for feature parity with desktop, plus a roadmap for leveraging the web value proposition
Migrating our existing clients while onboarding new clients
(Do the work!)
Evaluation
From the engineering side, our highest priority was getting to an optimized architecture and standardize our clients infrastructure. This was challenging and there’s still work to do, but we were methodical and persistent and now we’re pretty happy with our progress and infrastructure layout. For us, if a new client is immediately set on the standardized architecture, that’s a measure of success.