The building blocks of SaaS success for software companies

The challenges of migrating to SaaS are far outweighed by the rewards, whether a software company is transitioning to or expanding their SaaS business offering. Rather than being boxed in by software licensing or traditional ways of working, implementing the technical building blocks of SaaS creates the foundations for ongoing growth. Software companies can constantly iterate on models and explore new technologies like generative AI, offer specialized offerings, reach multiple target markets, and unlock new revenue streams.

However, while the value of SaaS is often well understood, the delivery model isn’t as simple as going from point A to point B. For many, it’s a significant transformational event that requires examining all the moving parts of a business. SaaS can affect how products are sold, marketed, built, supported, and monetized. These are among a long list of considerations for defining, building, and operating an as-a-service business.

Assuming your company has identified the business opportunity and market segment, you then need to determine the product strategy and roadmap. One of the key elements of delivering on that roadmap is the ability to innovate quickly and scale, all while operating within tight security boundaries. In this post, I’ll explore how software companies can mitigate complexity, balance these demands, and build momentum on the journey to SaaS. 

The nature of SaaS business means that software companies don’t just need to ship software, they need to manage it on a much greater—often global—level. This makes building resiliency and security a much bigger and more complex task. Infrastructure must also facilitate smooth customer onboarding without compromising other user experiences. This is where leveraging a cloud service provider can minimize the challenge, allowing SaaS companies to focus on their core proposition.

When catering to a global audience, software companies need to consider how this will affect their agility and operational efficiency. Success relies on being able to seamlessly deploy your offering into multiple geographies, all while maintaining a fit for purpose cost envelope.

AWS Global Infrastructure offers a unique advantage in providing businesses with greater flexibility and high availability without mandating a multi-region approach. Each AWS Region comprises at least three physically separate Availability Zones (AZs), which are clusters of data centers. This multi-AZ design sets AWS apart from other cloud providers in the SaaS market that often define a region as a single data center. The benefits of this structure include enhanced reliability, improved application and database scaling, and heightened security and compliance standards. 

Each AZ operates with independent power, cooling, and physical security, connected through low-latency networks with encrypted inter-AZ traffic. This design ensures robust performance, data protection, and operational resilience for businesses utilizing AWS services. Subsequently, companies can design applications to run across multiple AZs, enhancing protection against downtime—caused by various disruptions such as power outages or natural disasters—boosting business continuity and improving data availability.

With SaaS, the rate of innovation is also on an entirely different level—you’re not only transforming your business offering, but your development cycle changes too. To remain competitive, you must release new software quickly. Product teams and developers need the functionality to experiment in a nimble manner, create a continuous cycle of improvements, and use new technologies like generative AI.

But you can’t just develop software on a whim and expect it to take off. Product iterations should be driven by customer metrics and pain points, so that teams know exactly where to focus their efforts for maximum impact. Asking yourself a series of questions will help you understand the gaps to becoming more agile and delivering software thoughtfully:

• Are you collecting data and insights to understand your customer needs?
• How is this data affecting product development and strategy backlog?
• How are you enabling your developers to innovate and experiment? 
• Are you actively working on reducing the development and release cycle times
• Which tools and services are you building to accelerate your development pipeline?
  

To gain the innovation edge, you also need to lower the cost of failure and take tedious tasks off developers’ hands. Removing undifferentiated heavy lifting is critical to staying ahead in the world of SaaS. Experienced partners like AWS can help software companies quickly take advantage of game-changing technologies like generative AI via ready-made foundational models (FMs).

Rather than building large language models (LLMs) from scratch, all you need is a standard API to get started with services like Amazon Bedrock. Developers can experiment and target the best FMs for each use case, before customizing and fine-tuning them with proprietary data. Since Amazon Bedrock is serverless too, software companies can securely integrate generative AI capabilities into their products without having to manage infrastructure.

This is just one of over 200 AWS services that can be leveraged to accelerate SaaS innovation. Just think of each service as a block that can be put together creatively to build exciting solutions. The beauty is that you can keep iterating and growing on that SaaS product as the business expands, instead of being confined by a single boxed experience where you need to start afresh.

Ultimately, moving to a SaaS model doesn’t have to be rife with complexity if you have the right building blocks in place. Once you have the infrastructure, functionality, and strategic support to help simplify the transition, there’s no limit to your growth potential. No matter where you are in your journey to SaaS, AWS can provide commercial and technical support on your journey and provide the ability to leverage our AWS Partner Network to grow your business. Please reach out to your AWS account team or request support to start the conversation.