The Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) market is expected to reach $220.21 billion in value by 2022, and like any growing industry, this means there are a lot of fast-growth businesses competing for market share. While we’ve seen many SaaS companies launch innovative and successful products, many of them are missing the ability to scale with the growth of their customers.
Any ambitious SaaS company must balance the importance of satisfying customer needs today while maintaining an eye on their ability to scale in the future when demand grows. For many, this means partnering with an infrastructure provider that is structured to accommodate growth. This depends on the delivery of three critical capabilities: offering flexible SLAs, possessing the right tech in the right location, and providing a highly effective and trustworthy support function.
1. Flexible SLAs
An SLA, or a Service Level Agreement, outlines the type and level of service that can be expected from an infrastructure provider. An efficient infrastructure provider will offer different tiers of SLAs that are designed to meet their customer’s changing needs as they grow. For instance, this should allow infrastructure features or levels of support to grow in accordance with what is needed at different stages of a SaaS company’s development.
At Leaseweb, we offer several tiers of SLAs to accommodate growth in our customers and make it clear that it is both quick and easy to move up to a different tier as needs dictate. A great example of this flexibility comes from our customer, Jet-Stream, a highly innovative media streaming business. Having seen a 1,800% increase in business within its first five years of operation, Jet-Stream was able to utilize Leaseweb’s choice of SLA tiers to optimize their service delivery to always deliver low latency and high uptime to their customers.
2. Right Tech, Right Location
It is also important that the infrastructure provider makes it a priority to understand the current and projected goals of their SaaS customers. Armed with this information, they can invest in the right technology, in the right places and at the right times to ensure infrastructure grows at the pace of customer success.
At Leaseweb, understanding our customer’s growth goals is a critical part of our business philosophy. Recently, our customer Crytek, required a major global expansion of its server footprint when one of its gaming titles became available on the Xbox system. To accommodate this, Leaseweb customized 400 high-performance dedicated servers in high traffic locations including Germany, the UK, the Netherlands, Hong Kong and Sydney.
3. Superior Support
A SaaS-focused infrastructure provider should also offer a strong support function that includes 24/7 availability, minimum-to-no downtime and maximum flexibility. It should be the infrastructure provider’s mission to ensure that customers see them as a trusted advisor and that the SaaS companies they work with are confident in their commitment to service and support.
This is consistently at the forefront of everything Leaseweb does. We offer market leading levels of support to all our customers to ensure that they run their businesses with complete technical confidence. Our customer, Adjust, an international mobile attribution and analytics specialist firm, experienced this when they had the challenge of increasing from 30 to 200 servers and from 200 to 2000 clients. Leaseweb was not only able to assist them with a 10 GB link to link their cluster of Frankfurt servers, but also added additional private servers in Amsterdam – bringing the total server power to 200 units and growing. The solution was backed by highly efficient support services, including remote hands.
To find out more about how Leaseweb can support the growth of your SaaS business, visit https://www.leaseweb.com/solutions/saas.