By: George Thangadurai, CEO, HEAL Software Inc.
Marc Andreessen wrote the famous op-ed “Why Software is Eating the World” in 2011. His written words became a true prediction of what we see today. Software as a service (SaaS) has become the primary method of software delivery and access for software companies ranging from CRM to video conferencing to e-commerce. Gartner predicts that the SaaS market will continue to expand to $145B by 2022. Consumers and businesses have not only become accustomed to, but also expect SaaS-based solutions, and even more so in today’s post-COVID world when accessing from anywhere on any device has become a necessity. The new deployment model allows features to be rolled out at an unprecedented pace, allowing for continuous innovation, sustainable competitive advantages and in some cases barriers to imitation.
SaaS solutions have driven valuations for many tech companies based on metrics such as annual recurring revenue (ARR), revenue growth, churn and unit economics. It has also paved the way for companies providing SaaS-based solutions for the non-tech domain to enter a higher valuation podium. Customers expect a very high service level experience from SaaS solutions, and it is common to see 99.99% or higher service level agreements (SLAs) with clearly defined penalties if the offering falls short. company. High customer acquisition costs have also become the norm in this hyper-competitive market. To make matters worse, switching costs for users are very low, putting more pressure on maintenance efforts. SaaS companies must balance customer acquisition and continued growth while simultaneously growing brand equity to ensure high quality service and control costs.
Key features of SaaS Solutions
SaaS solutions typically feature multi-tenancy, automated provisioning, single sign-on, subscription-based billing, data security, application security and auditing capabilities. Moreover, they are built on a resilient infrastructure that provides high availability.
SaaS solutions run either entirely in the cloud or in a mix of private cloud/on-prem and one or more public clouds to span and serve different geographic regions. With the growing prevalence and reliance on application programming interfaces (APIs), developers are increasingly using the many third-party tools and solutions readily available in the cloud. DevOps teams can use virtualized environments that allow for immediate auto-scaling. However, ITOps teams are chartered in providing solution availability at all times, regardless of workload fluctuations, while keeping within a very tight budget.
While the focus is often on the SaaS offering and features, operations teams are tasked with ensuring that the service is up and running 24×7. ITOps and site reliability engineers (SRE) are usually in the hot seat, especially if they are responsible for smooth operations at SaaS companies. To meet the demands placed on them, ITOps teams need end-to-end visibility and efficient control over rapidly evolving application functionality and infrastructure elements. It is almost impossible for human administrators to do this manually. Fortunately, the modern AIOps paradigm has the skills and chops to augment ITOps teams and make them successful. When interfacing and aligning with DevOps teams, ITOps teams must ensure that features and bug fixes that go through different phases (development, testing and production) in the agile framework of development today – most common in SaaS services – will be released without any glitches.
SaaS businesses prefer to use solutions that are also deployed as SaaS and this is particularly applicable to AIOps tools. An AIOps solution deployed as SaaS needs to have these functionalities and features to ensure that a company’s SaaS offering can serve its users’ performance and scale needs:
Observation: It is important to monitor the application and the related infrastructure elements. Modern AIOps solutions can leverage existing monitoring and alert data through connectors, including logs. This is key when many cloud providers already deliver some key metrics. However, in many environments, there is a need for agent installation and monitoring metrics. Observability is the first step and AIOps benefit on the journey to a truly great SaaS offering.
A pane of glass with end-to-end visibility: Although operations teams may work in silos in large enterprises, AIOps solutions can provide an end-to-end view of the entire infrastructure and application landscape including topology and highlight relationships which may otherwise be unclear.
AI-based insights and analytics: AIOps tools can provide deep insight into the entire application and infrastructure ecosystem, however complex and dispersed they may be. They can penetrate seasonality, allowing ITOps teams to focus on what matters most. If trained enough, these tools can generate early warnings and lead signals to avoid possible losses and anomalies. AIOps solutions scale what is physically and structurally difficult for humans to achieve – they can relate to silos, metrics and alerts.
SaaS metrics and KPIs: SaaS companies expect the metrics and KPIs associated with all the tools they use to be consistent and aligned with what they report to their users and customers. Therefore, the AIOps solution should also display and report these same or similar metrics.
RCA, solution recommendations and workflow automation: AIOp solutions not only predict potential problems, but can also identify causes quickly and provide solution recommendations. Moreover, tight integration with IT service management (ITSM) tools and automation can trigger appropriate workflows. ITSM solutions from companies like ServiceNow and Remedy have become the workhorses of the modern IT operations paradigm. SaaS businesses have some of the highest needs for automation. In addition, rapid correction and remediation of a problem is necessary for maintaining the entire IT environment.
outcome: SaaS providers can achieve tremendous value by implementing innovative AIOps solutions. After all, it is now possible to achieve negative or very small mean time to remediate (MTTR) and very large mean time between incidents (MTBI). Additionally, having the ability to do very granular capacity planning means that SaaS companies can confidently reduce cloud costs across the entire application and infrastructure landscape without affecting the ability to scale up or down as dictated. of business objectives.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: George Thangadurai is CEO at Heal Software Inc., the innovator of game-changing preventive healing software for businesses known as HEAL, which fixes problems before they happen.