SaaS for the ISV Masses through SaaSGrid Express

Jun 7, 2010 by Sinclair Schuller

When my partners and I co-founded Apprenda, we had a number of very specific goals when it came to SaaS enablement and we wanted SaaSGrid to embody those goals. My co-founders and I all came from technical backgrounds where we were responsible for SaaS engineering efforts. We learned early on that when a SaaS application is engineered properly, its architecture is drastically different than plain old web applications (think multi-tenancy and scale-out) and that a huge number of auxilliary tools and subsystems (think billing, application life-cycle management, infrastructure management, subscriptions, identity federation, etc. and then some) are necessary for managing and operating a SaaS offering and business.

When you combined these “SaaS specific” aspects of a SaaS offering, the upfront and ongoing time and money investment required far eclipsed that of the application itself (the actual thing your customers want to pay you for!), and causes huge competency distraction. Taking on the build out and maintenance of a mature “SaaS stack” is akin to a software company deciding that it’s in their best interest to build and maintain their own DB technology in support of their business application.  Surely, most people buy RDBMS tech (like SQL Server) or download it (like PostgreSQL) to help ensure succcess, and firmly believe that they need not build their own. When we created SaaSGrid, we had some very specific things we wanted it to do:

1. Allow for the use of traditional stacks (in our case, the Microsoft .NET platform) and the wealth of tools and components already in existence for these stacks. New languages are best created in support of new modeling paradigms or changes in the ways we capture solutions, and not in support of a new delivery model. Traditional runtimes simply needed to be “enhanced” to really sing in an on-demand scenario.
2. Have it be comprehensive and not require a “paper mâché” approach to piecing together disjointed capabilities. Imagine that an operating system required that you find your networking substack from here, and a graphics subsystem from there, and then require that you mash them together. That would be sub-optimal in many ways.
3. Have SaaSGrid provide even the most complex capabilities, like multi-tenancy, as transparently as possible to the application code that runs on top of it. As technologists, we hate having technologies adulterate our code, so to the extent possible, we wanted SaaSGrid to be as low impact as possible.

We accomplished our goals and some, and our customers benefit wildly from SaaSGrid. But late last year, we were thinking about a number of things related to the market and to SaaSGrid. As a company, we’re committed to not only supporting the transition to SaaS, but to catalyzing it. I think great strides have been made with respect to software company adoption of the new delivery model, but the fact of the matter is, most ISVs are still not SaaS. Furthermore, those that want to become serious SaaS players have a tough time understanding how they can get there and what tools are available to them.

Enter SaaSGrid Express!

Anyone that follows my company Apprenda knows that we recently made a new product announcement with SaaSGrid Express. SaaSGrid Express is a freely downloadable application server that captures nearly all of the value of our tried and true SaaSGrid, and that can be used by anyone just to experiment or even to build a revenue producing business. Our goal with SaaSGrid Express is to let everyone experience the value that SaaSGrid has to offer, and more importantly, to democratize a highly complex SaaS architecture in hopes of moving the industry forward.

Phil Wainewright recently offered some excellent insight in his recent blog post regarding SaaSGrid Express; the goal of democratization also means that some people might get there hands on a technology but are simply not prepared to build their own clouds. But as Wainewright went on to point out, those same people would have gone down that path with or without SaaSGrid, so we’re happy that they’ll be able to walk away with such a robust starting point. Giving SaaSGrid Express to the world means that more people than ever before can experiment with and commit to a proper SaaS architecture, which will definitely help satisfy our vision of catalyzing the space. As Dana Gardner suggested, SaaSGrid Express opens up the potential for a “cloud standard” architecture and SaaS stack. If we accomplish that sort of de-facto standard, then the industry is definitely off to a good start. Having a de-facto SaaS stack means that people are not focusing on complex architectures, but on business value for their customers – which would be a huge win for everyone.

Something Special for YOU!

For those loyal SaaSBlogs readers that have an interest in downloading SaaSGrid Express and building an application, we’d like to offer you something special:

For the first 5 SaaSBlogs readers that sign up for SaaSGrid Express with the intention of building an application, or migrating your existing .NET offering, we’ll commit 1 hour of time from one of our engineers to personally work with you, and get you up and running with your project!

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