Driving Revenue and Savings

By Turning Apps into SaaS

How a SaaS Hub Revolutionizes Enterprise App Development and Delivery

A P P R E N D A White Papers

A P P R E N D A White Papers

Driving Revenue and Savings

By Turning Apps into SaaS
How a SaaS Hub Revolutionizes Enterprise App Development and Delivery
During the next several years, nearly every organization regardless of industry will become a software company. Simultaneously,
IT leaders are finding they need to deliver world-class services and an ecosystem where customers, employees, and partners
can build, deploy, and monetize cloud services. Organizations can achieve both these goals through Software-as-a-Service
(SaaS) applications.
SaaS is an on-demand delivery option that works on all devices with a web browser and an Internet connection. The SaaS delivery
model can reduce costs while easing deployment and updating of applications. However, many organizations have found those
benefits elusive because of the challenges in developing SaaS applications, which require advanced software architectures.
Apprenda has transformed many Fortune 100 IT departments by helping to create SaaS Hubs that allow departments to easily
develop custom multi-tenant applications. The departments can then deliver and update those applications through a SaaS model,
all while being hosted on Apprenda in an organizations private data center.
According to Gartner, SaaS will grow at a 20.2% compound annual growth rate through 2017, while some SaaS subsectors will
see growth as high as 39.3% 1. The value and competitive edge that an ecosystem of interconnected services creates for a given
enterprise can catapult organizations to a leading position in an era dominated by consumers and businesses accessing software
from mobile, tablets, and laptops.
When building a SaaS application, a great deal of development time and money go into creating code that is common to all
SaaS applications. Apprendas private Platform as a Service (PaaS) eases development efforts by providing programmers a
hub, APIs, and middleware to build SaaS applications for each business unit in an organization. Those applications can then be
updated and delivered on the SaaS Hub to customers with the architectural qualities and componentized services expected
of a mature SaaS offering.

Forecast: Public Cloud Services, Worldwide, 2012-2018

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Apprenda Private PaaS Provides

Middleware for Building SaaS Applications
SAAS HUB

App 1
DB

DB

DB

App 2

App 3

DB

DB

Apprenda Platform
E N T I T L E M E N T M O N I TO R I N G
ACCOUNT MANAGEMENT

B U/C U S TO M E R O N B O A R D I N G

METERING RUNTIME

SUBSCRIBER MANAGEMENT

M U LT I-T E N A N T

I D E N T I T Y F E D E R AT I O N

EN T IT L EM EN T DE F I N I T I O N S U S E R AUTH E NTICATIO N APPL ICATIO N SCAL ING & E L ASTICIT Y

Windows / Linux

$
DE V

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DE V

Business Unit

Business Unit

OWNS APP 1 & 2

OWNS APP 3

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Dont underestimate the scale of the engineering that goes into

building out this layer of cloud platform management services.
Gartner, Platform as a Service (PaaS) for Private Cloud

1. Savings with Zero-Effort Single Instance Multi-tenancy

Reduced cost with shared application stack components (e.g. databases) across many customers
Multi-tenant virtualized SaaS is the next step in modern, efficient, cost-effective, and flexible architecture on any device. Single
instance multi-tenancy is a software architecture principle where application components, such as the database, web services,
and user interfaces, are shared across a number of customers, rather than each individual customer having its own copy.
This complex design drives efficiency in the SaaS model because it reduces operational costs. Instead of having thousands
of devices all managed by the organization, business units can now worry about updating and managing a single application.
Because of coarse-grain allocation of guest operating system kernels with virtual machines, traditionally applications can only
scale to tens of customers on a single server. Multi-tenancy allows organizations to save money by allowing a single application
service to hundreds of users.
With single instance multi-tenancy, IT departments can further consolidate hardware and deploy an application through a
centralized delivery model. This change, in turn, helps product managers create better software, while delighting customers
who can now consume software through this preferred method.
H O W A P P R E N D A S U P P O R T S S I N G L E I N S TA N C E M U LT I-T E N A N C Y

Apprendas application-level, single-instance multi-tenancy isolates end users by handling data partitioning, request routing,
and authorization security at the application server layer -- even though end users are sharing resources. Furthermore, Apprenda
provides the ability to define certain aspects of the applications multi-tenant behavior, such as whether data from multiple
customers can be mixed in database deployments or separated into dedicated databases. This powerful concept of configurable
drop-in single instance multi-tenancy provides massive improvements to the utilization of community cloud resources and,
more importantly, a significant reduction in cost and time spent on developing SaaS-based applications. Developers build
applications and product managers can monetize them quicker than ever before.

2. Shared SaaS Hub Platform for Custom SaaS Applications

Boosting developer productivity by baking common SaaS code into a shared platform
SaaS involves a number of new architectural techniques that are needed to solve challenges associated with scaling software
across tens of thousands of customers. Most of this common SaaS-specific code is not at all related to the application domain
and is difficult to write and maintain. Application component partitioning for multi-tenancy, seamless linear scaling, user
management, customer provisioning, monetization, and database abstraction are all large and tricky portions of software to
develop. When combined, these mission-critical SaaS pieces define a SaaS stack and can easily overshadow an organizations
application development efforts in even the most modest SaaS development efforts.

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With a private PaaS, operations teams can pool public, private, virtualized, and bare-metal infrastructure resources and makes
those resources available to developers. Central IT becomes the PaaS provider to internal developers in individual lines of
businesses creating SaaS applications. A PaaS should bake many of the complex architectural features of SaaS into the
platform. The middleware then eases developers workloads because they do not need to re-code complicated SaaS features.
Some of the SaaS services that are needed include:

Single instance multi-tenancy (as described above)

Data isolation and data scoping capabilities
Horizontal scaling and auto-scaling of all application tiers
Meta-data driven runtimes to manage entitlements/customization
Location transparent modularization of application components
First-class workflows for complex processes, ranging from customer provisioning to database shards and shard relocation
Application lifecycle management

Private PaaS deployments can give operations teams the control they need through governances and resource policies while
giving developers the experience they want. Additionally, a private PaaS can give software engineers a self-service resource to
develop SaaS applications with ease.
H O W A P P R E N D A P R O V I D E S A S H A R E D P L AT F O R M F O R S A A S D E V E L O P M E N T

Apprenda provides Hub, APIs, and middleware for SaaS development. In SaaS, it is critical to determine access rights, entitlements,
storing data correctly, and more. Typically application writers would be responsible for tracking those features, but in Apprenda
the mechanism is provided to applications out of the box (see Figure 1 for feature list). Apprenda is delivered by central IT,
which can pool resources and make them available to software engineers in a centralized repository and listing of available
services. Organizations using Apprenda to build SaaS applications have accelerated the time-to-market of their applications.

Without Apprenda

With Apprenda

SaaS Application

SaaS Application

SaaS Application

USER INTERFACE

USER INTERFACE

USER INTERFACE

BUSINESS LOGIC

BUSINESS LOGIC

BUSINESS LOGIC

DATABASE

DATABASE

DATABASE

Costly Development of Components:

Apprenda Platform

MULTI-TENANCY USER SYSTEM SCALE PRICE

MULTI-TENANCY USER SYSTEM SCALE PRICE

SECURITY METERING PROVISIONING ETC.

SECURITY METERING PROVISIONING ETC.

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3. Governance, Risk, and Compliance for SaaS Hubs

Protecting highly regulated data by defining and enforcing application deployment policies.
When enterprises manage large numbers of servers in a single resource pool, situations often arise where applications need
to be mapped to a very specific infrastructure. In many cases, this is due to security or regulatory compliance issues.
Private PaaS leverages defined application deployment policies to enable fine-grained mapping of applications or application
components to infrastructure based upon specific, configurable properties. Instead of creating multiple silos with different
rules and configurations based on business needs, private PaaS enables enterprises to consolidate applications on shared
infrastructure while using sophisticated deployment policies to honor specific business, security, or legal requirements.
In a SaaS Hub, all parts of the organization operate in the same environment, so central IT has assurances that it can enforce
the appropriate policies.
HOW APPRENDA SUPPORTS GOVERNANCE, RISK AND COMPLIANCE FOR SAAS HUBS

Apprenda application deployment policies enable operations to control how applications are matched to infrastructure across
its environment. This ensures that highly regulated data (such as that which falls under the governance of PCII or HIPAA)
remains securely hosted on appropriate infrastructure and all tenant applications remain compliant.
FIND OUT FOR YOURSELF
This paper has outlined some of the benefits of building a SaaS Hub for all lines of business in an organization using a private PaaS.
There are numerous other capabilities that private PaaS enables, but which are not captured in this high-level overview. If you are
interested in finding out more about Apprendas Private Platform-as-a-Service, the best way is to experience it for yourself.
Apprenda offers three simple ways to do this:
1. Sign up for the monthly Open Demo webinar
2. Request access to Apprenda Express and explore the free version of the platform
3. Arrange a Proof-of-Concept (PoC) for your organization
All three can be accessed by visiting the Apprenda website or contacting us.

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Apprenda, Inc.
433 River Street
Troy NY 12180
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