We witness the proliferation of SaaS solutions daily — from AI applications like Private ChatGPT and infrastructure services like Snowflake, to content management systems such as WordPress, and HR management systems like Workday. The spectrum extends to customer support tools like Zendesk, customer engagement platforms like Salesforce, and collaboration solutions like Zoom, Slack, and Google Workspace. SaaS has become the prevailing distribution model in today’s software landscape and is poised to define the future of software delivery.
The rationale behind this shift is evident. SaaS facilitates rapid software distribution, shortens sales cycles, accelerates revenue generation, fosters agile innovation cycles through prompt feedback, enhances customer service and retention, and drives down operational costs, all while achieving economies of scale.
However, transforming software into SaaS is hard, and only those rich with huge capital investment could afford it. I have been working in the SaaS industry for 17 years and have built more than half a dozen SaaS services in different domains across different providers like AWS, Microsoft, Confluent, and other SaaS startups. Every time Alok and I had to SaaSify software, it ended up taking a significant portion of the engineering resources to build and operate this layer, as opposed to focusing on the core innovation.
Earlier in our Omnistrate journey, when we spoke to many other companies from different verticals, they shared the same pain and frustration that building a SaaS is costly and time-consuming. Here is an excellent blog from ClickHouse on how it took their world-class team a year to launch their initial SaaS (in AWS only in a subset of the regions). Let’s be honest; not all of us can afford to raise anywhere close to $250MM at a $2B valuation immediately after founding the company. Moreover, not all of us have the luxury to hire an industry veteran in this space like Yury Izrailevsky (ex-VP of Engineering at Google) to lead the team.
Now, ClickHouse already had a working open-source product before they started. Confluent also started with the open-source product, and only after they raised hundreds of millions of dollars did they start building their cloud. MongoDB, Elastic, Redis, Redpanda, all had the same story. The reason is that the cost of doing a SaaS business has been so high that it almost takes the focus away from the core product.
We asked ourselves why it has to be that way. What if we make it simple for anyone to build the SaaS in no time? What if we can assist startups in finding the product-market fit by making it easier for their customers to consume and try it out? What if ISVs don’t have to spend millions of dollars to build your SaaS? What if we democratize this technology to the rest of the world?
At Omnistrate, we took this challenge with a vision in mind to make it a few clicks for anyone to build and operate their SaaS, whether it's new software or an existing product, whether born on-prem or grown in the cloud. Several customers, including a public database company, have successfully built their offerings using Omnistrate and are operating it in the cloud.
“Partnering with Omnistrate was a pivotal decision for our SaaS project. Their offering not only expedited our development process but also ensured a timely launch, allowing us to capitalize on a crucial market opportunity.”, SVP of Public Database Company
“Our friends at another company told us it took them 2 years to build their control plane using Vanilla AWS APIs. Omnistrate enabled us to ship our Cloud platform in only weeks.”, CEO of Convoy
“Using Omnistrate to manage, deploy and configure SaaS applications in a multi-cloud model is nothing short of remarkable. The work that would take me months now can happen in minutes”, CTO of Paigo
The core of our tech is to transform your application into SaaS with minimum effort, requiring no code changes to your application, automating day to day operations along with integrations with other SaaS providers so that businesses can build or accelerate their SaaS offering in one-tenth of the time and cost.
In the next blog post, we will cover what it entails in building your SaaS, and how users can leverage a SaaS platform to address many of these challenges in the subsequent post.