Cloud-native SaaS architecture can help CSPs increase speed and flexibility, and if you combine with agile delivery, you unlock the formula for greater business success powered by IT. Andreas Gabriel, CTO, Beyond Now, explains how.
A SaaS-based delivery model is most likely the preferred choice for offloading a lot of the operation complexity in the software. You don’t want to waste your valuable resources on things like capacity management, performance tuning, patching it up and so on. You rather want your people to focus on market differentiation and customer experience. You want to benefit from continuous upgrades and feature enhancements that are delivered in such a SaaS environment.
Also, SaaS solutions bring a lot of speed and reduce the risk at the start of the projection. It’s immediately available you can start focusing on delivering business outcomes from day one on. A cloud-native technology and a SaaS-based delivery model are two very important success factors for achieving business agility. Other ones – the methodology and processes that you use for rolling out new services in the market.
You can see quite a complex chart here with a lot of feedback loops which you all know from the agile world. If you look at this in more detail you can actually see there are two different parts to this.
The first part is about getting the right ideas which means understanding the customer needs and finding the right solutions. This requires short iterations for quickly validating the strategy in the product market. Quickly deploying them and measuring the outcomes will get you a much faster result than designing solutions on Powerpoint in your office.
The second part of this is all about getting the ideas right, which means scaling the solution, by continuously improving the customer experience and the level of automation. All of this needs to be enabled by training up the business and IT integrated teams, all focusing on the same outcome, and incrementally delivering these outcomes. The use of cloud-based technology and SaaS delivery model greatly reduces operation complexity – it allows you to focus on market differentiation and customer experience.
Less people are required to run such a solution, and less people means less overhead and higher speed. An agile and iterative delivery model allows you to quickly launch and validate new ideas with customers and constantly improve them with short iterations.
Joining up the business, IT and vendors as integrated teams working on a common set of goals, delivering results in short iterations, will enable you to get there faster.
The last and probably most important success factor are the people themselves. Only if you have experienced people in your teams that understand the technology as well as the business domain is it possible to avoid massive management overheads that ultimately slow you down and decrease costs.
