SaaSGrid Overview
Out of the Box
Revolutionizing SaaS
Building a SaaS business has traditionally been plagued by hurdles ranging from significant technical needs and
long project implementation schedules to building an appropriate revenue model and operations framework. Today,
independent software vendors (ISVs) no longer have these worries: SaaSGrid has revolutionized the way SaaS business applications
are built, deployed and sold. SaaSGrid empowers software companies with the ability to build powerful SaaS applications at break neck speeds, smashing time to market
barriers, removing implementation roadblocks, and significantly reducing risk. When creating SaaSGrid, our vision was clear:
provide a layer that makes building a SaaS business easy, and do for on-demand business applications what the operating system did for the desktop.
SaaSGrid deals with a majority of core SaaS technical and business needs including "out of the box" multi-tenancy, powerful application lifecycle and version management,
monetization and billing needs, user and authorization management, high availability, and customer contract management.
Because of this, software companies can now focus on their core competency of delivering value to their customers and ignoring these mission critical yet
non-strategic parts required of any true SaaS offering.
Rather than requiring the use of a proprietary technology stack, language, or a limiting online WYSIWYG environment, SaaSGrid
applications are built using the industry-hardened Microsoft .NET stack and the SaaSGrid SDK. To build a SaaSGrid
application, a software company downloads and installs the SDK. The SDK hooks into Microsoft's Visual Studio, and provides an
integrated development environment that allows a software company to write business code, user interfaces, and databases locally by using popular .NET languages like C#.
The SaaSGrid API can be used to tap into a variety of capabilities such as monetization, metering and user information. While in development, the SaaSGrid SDK provides a local testing
environment which emulates running the application in a SaaSGrid cloud. When ready, the application can be uploaded to a cloud instance of SaaSGrid, tested in a live "sandbox" and subsequently
published into production on a live SaaSGrid cloud instance, hosted by one of our hosting partners. Being a Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering, SaaSGrid gives you significant
advantage in terms of choice and utility power.
Through SaaSGrid web portals, a software company can manage pricing structure, customer contracts, application updates and new releases, billing, and customer support.
This power is delivered by SaaSGrid without the application code having to participate, giving unparalleled power with no time investment. Taking advantage of SaaSGrid
simply requires an ISV to:
- Contact Apprenda and download and install the SaaSGrid SDK, documentation and sample code
- Port an existing or write a new single tenant web application in Visual Studio using ASP.NET and other IIS hostable web technologies, SQL Server, and web services.
- Upload the application to SaaSGrid in the cloud
- Configure billing information such as your merchant account
- Supply SaaSGrid with monetization information - grouping features into plans, pricing the plans, defining optional items and their pricing and creating editions
- Publish the application, making it available for sale
- Copy a small piece of HTML to your corporate website to establish an e-commerce storefront where prospects can sign up and be provisioned
- Manage your application in the cloud in a no-code fashion through SaaSGrid's interfaces!
With very little effort, an ISV is able to establish a complete and manageable SaaS presence, focusing time, money and effort on the dynamics of their business and not on SaaS overhead.