What is Software as a Service (SaaS)?
Software as a service (SaaS) is a software licensing and delivery model in which software built using Java is licensed on a subscription basis and is centrally hosted on rented cloud infrastructure from AWS, Google and Azure. SaaS is also known as “on-demand software” and Web-based/Web-hosted software.
As a sub-theme/target audience, SaaS includes companies where the business is in the eyeballs (e.g. Pinterest, Snap, etc.) While these are not software applications, they are largely subscription based and have material IT spend as the user count grows.
What is Important for a SaaS Company to Grow?
- Revenue is tied closely to recurring payments for on-demand, cloud-based software or subscription.
- Data and analytics the top drivers of business growth – collecting, analyzing, and developing insights from data is critical – like predictive modeling for customer post-sale or testing different pricing models.
- Customer experience and adoption/activation of new services to hit recurring revenue targets; reducing customer churn; and customer satisfaction / loyalty.
What Are the Main Challenges SaaS Companies are Facing as they Mature?*
The cost of cloud for software delivery starts to eat into revenue. The challenges are how to navigate trade-offs between:
- Maximizing customer experience
- Maximizing application performance
- Minimize infrastructure costs to deliver #1 and #2
*Background: Many SaaS companies look at how to optimize for cloud-based operating models – or FinOps; invest more in Application Performance Management tools to observation and analysis of application health, performance and user experience; and educate themselves on how to understand and untangle their cloud costs – including CloudZero and emerging companies like https://www.finout.io/.
What are the Benefits of Software as a Service?
| Minimize Infrastructure Costs | Maximize Customer Experience | Improve Application Performance |
|---|---|---|
| Extreme Scale Without Over-Provisioning | Less Time Tuning – Better Cloud Experience | Elastic IT Footprint to Recover Funds for Performance & Growth |
| Evidence | Evidence | Evidence |
| Blog: “The Practical ROI of Running Kafka on Azul Platform Prime” Summary: Azul Platform Prime helps you get more mileage out of Kafka by reducing infrastructure costs 40%. |
Digital Page: Maximize Java in any Cloud Environment Summary: Azul Platform Prime is a superior JVM that optimizes data processing and transforms cloud economics with the best JVM for the most demanding applications. |
Whitepaper: Higher Performance Microservices Using Java Summary: Azul Platform Prime offers numerous advantages over a traditional JVM for microservices – including better responsiveness under load and support for multiple JVM instances per machine. A more modern JVM that eliminates the warm-up phase of Microservice performance. |
| Customer: Bazaarvoice Summary: SaaS-based E-commerce Content Engine Displaying authentic user-generated content on e-commerce websites demands a lot of cloud. Azul Platform Prime helps Bazaarvoice serve tens of billions of requests per month, which translates to tens of thousands of requests per second. Quote: “Without Azul Platform Prime, we would be running five times more infrastructure. Azul has allowed us to focus only on our applications. We don’t have to worry about performance.” -Cody Bayer, DevOps Engineer, Bazaarvoice |
Customer: Taboola Summary: SaaS-based Digital Ad Delivery – or ‘Ad-tech’ Company Before, the server would stop responding for 15 full minutes for garbage collection. Taboola tried different approaches to performance-tune it. Azul Platform Prime reduced bottlenecks – improving performance using less infrastructure freeing up more servers in pool to allocate as needed. Quote: “With Azul Platform Prime, we were able to reduce our front-end servers by more than 30%, which is hundreds of servers. We gained elasticity and delivered more performance with a smaller IT footprint – we now have more flexible provisioning options for growth.” -Ariel Pisetzky, VP of IT, Taboola |
Customer: Bazaarvoice Summary: SaaS-based E-commerce Content Engine Displaying authentic user-generated content on e-commerce websites demands a lot of cloud. Azul Platform Prime helps Bazaarvoice serve tens of billions of requests per month, which translates to tens of thousands of requests per second. Quote: “Without Azul Platform Prime, we would be running five times more infrastructure. Azul has allowed us to focus only on our applications. We don’t have to worry about performance.” -Cody Bayer, DevOps Engineer, Bazaarvoice |
What is Azul’s Software as a Service Solution?
Azul Platform Prime, a truly superior Java platform that helps you set new performance records with your Java apps. Put lag and latency in the past and delight your customers — giving you a competitive edge.
Azul Platform Prime is the Java platform that delivers mind-blowing performance with less cloud resources.
Prime customers improve application performance, throughput, and responsiveness by eliminating problems of garbage collection pauses, stalls, and stop-the-world failures without changing a single line of code. You can meet SLA targets with fewer cloud instances and fewer servers and much less troubleshooting and performance tuning needed.
The Cloud Native Compiler is a scalable Just-In-Time (JIT) compilation server. Where traditional JVMs are isolated and have to compile from scratch at every restart just to start warming up, Azul cloud-native JVMs use CNC to offload JIT compilation to separate and dedicated service resources in the cloud. This fundamental transformation provides more processing power while freeing your client JVMs from the burden of doing JIT compilation locally, while preserving profiles for faster startup and warmup. This allows you to improve Java and JVM-based application performance while right-sizing infrastructures to deliver cost savings, especially when leveraging cloud connectivity at scale.
CNC vs the competition chart:
Azul Platform Prime
A truly superior Java platform that can cut your infrastructure costs in half.