Although the cloud is not a new idea, it’s capabilities are now only starting to come to life. The Cloud is real and it is here to stay. Your customers are expecting cloud-based solutions, but your products that you’ve invested so heavily in, run on-premise only. Now what?
If all clients had the same requirements this would be easy, but the truth is, software is complicated, and choosing the right approach when transitioning to the Cloud can be difficult. As an established and successful software publisher, you have three options, each of which you must weigh against your business objectives and customer needs.
1.) Rewrite Your Products to Run Natively in the Cloud
Pros: Multi-tenant, flexible, scalable, and low OpEx. The key is to get the architecture right, have a strong emphasis on design and consistent and clean implementation. Not something that’s easy to achieve.
Cons: Extremely low return on invested capital, typically high risk, high up-front costs, and multi-year R&D commitment.
2.) Use Cloud Infrastructure as a Service
Fire-up virtual machines to host your existing applications, and use Terminal Services or Citrix to enable customers to access the solution.
Pros: High return on invested capital – you save by running your applications as-is on virtual machines.
Cons: Not multi-tenant, high OpEx, high maintenance costs because each customer requires their own set of virtual machines, limited ability for integration with other systems that are running on-premise.
3.) Hybrid Transition: On-premise & Cloud-based
You’ll continue to run your core products on-premise, but commit to developing new features, extensions, and innovative systems of engagement as cloud-first solutions.
Pros: High return on invested capital. Your customers’ on-premise integrations are unaffected. Your new cloud-based SaaS offerings provide new recurring revenue streams, and your customers perceive your overall product portfolio as being more innovative and modern
Cons: Requires your engineering team to break out of the habit of thinking that every new feature/enhancement must be made INSIDE the product, and requires them to ramp up on cloud architecture and technologies.
This last hybrid cloud option builds on the strengths of your on-premise solutions, and lets you incrementally move to the cloud while giving your customers the innovation they’ve been craving through multi-tenant SaaS solutions that seamlessly communicate with and complement your existing systems.
Time, cost, and risk are minimized, and you get a tremendous return on invested capital. The possibilities are promising and can rapidly activate new recurring revenue streams. What’s not to like?
These are proven facts, not predictions of the future.
How to Deploy a Hybrid Solution
- Build and deploy a local agent – a lightweight service that runs on premise and connects your existing application to cloud base services.
- Deploy a Cloud based Gateway – a single multi-tenant gateway providing centralized access to all of your customers’ on-premise data in real-time through a secure bi-directional communication stream.
- Build new applications and solutions – Web, Mobile, Portals and other SaaS apps that your clients have been asking for. Deploy them once, and they’re immediately available to your customers.
A turn-key, cloud-based, multi-tenant solution that embraces and extends your on-premise products. This nimble approach builds on the strengths of your existing product portfolio yet delivers on the promise of Cloud based SaaS solutions. Justify a price uplift for your current customers and more rapidly acquire new customers.
Cloud will provide digital infrastructure for your biggest organizational wins, but you need to choose the correct Cloud strategy for your business.
Contact us to learn how Modularis can help you with your cloud migration efforts.