Helping ISVs Deliver Apps as SaaS
Egenera's Xterity cloud is a perfect fit for software providers.
Unlike the massive cloud companies that sell to everybody ISVs, MSPs, enterprises, startups, and developers Egenera's Xterity cloud is a wholesale Infrastructure as a Service provider, so we are engineered to deliver cloud services through partnerships with companies like yours.
Being built to help Independent Software Vendors succeed means understanding the unique challenges they deal with. Much of Egenera’s history is rooted in developing business applications so we know that each customer an ISV has taken a lot of time, money, and resources to get to a yes. We support the need to ensure that on-boarding is done smoothly and quickly. We understand the need to keep your resources focused on enhancing and supporting your application, not delivering it. Many of our partners have found us after watching costs for training, cloud services, and support skyrocket eroding their margins. These stories are the best evidence of how Egenera's Xterity cloud can be the perfect fit for ISVs.
The support your customer's demand
By far the most common thread in our sales discussions is support. The fact is that unless you have very large cloud deployments, or pay significant premiums for premier support programs, most of the major cloud providers will not provide you with the type of support response your customers expect from you. To complicate matters getting in touch with a truly experienced engineer for most cloud providers requires multiple emails, escalations and delays any meaningful support feedback by hours if not days. The reality of a ISV delivering their services as SaaS is that their end users expect service contracts with aggressive SLAs, not just for uptime, but for any technical issues. So many ISVs find that delivering those SLAs to their end users is just not possible if they have to work with most cloud providers standard support response. Sending an electronic ticket in and crossing your fingers that you will get a response the same day and that the initial engineer is skilled enough to help solve the problem. Egenera's service is available to all Xterity customers 24/7 365 days a year online or via phone without any additional cost. Even our L1 engineers have been supporting critical cloud environments for years. In fact, we take service so seriously that the CEO ensures he meets every new Xterity partner during on boarding so they have a direct line to him should something not meet their expectations.
Cost control
Another common discussion is known as "Bill Shock" from their cloud provider where metered services like bandwidth, recovery, IO, etc spiked running up massive charges that somehow you need to pass onto your customer. Sometimes it is even costs related to expedited tech support! Stories of bills doubling from one month to the next due to a spike in usage are common. Recently stories of accounts that were remotely hacked and dozens of servers setup to do nefarious things like mine bitcoin have been on the rise. Egenera cloud partners can set controls on new charges, fix price any services, and utilize a cloud control that is immune to the type of API hacks that are on the rise. This allows ISVs with SaaS customers to ensure their costs do not overrun their revenue even when the user counts are static, but usage is going up.
Simple to quote, deploy, and manage.
Training can be a factor for Independent Software Vendors also. These organizations staff developers and engineers that focus on their application having to bring on resources with expertise or certifications in cloud solutions is expensive and a distraction from their core competencies. Training their existing employees can make it harder to retain those resources as they acquire highly sought-after certifications. Others find their staff spend an ever increasing amount of time keeping up with changes in pricing, features, and processes and less time delivering their development related goals. Egenera's cloud control is designed to have a near zero training requirement for sales and technical staff. New partners often watch a few short videos, attend a one-hour orientation meeting and they are quoting, building, and managing their cloud systems.
Guarding your IP
Egenera has even worked with ISVs that came to us with concerns about competition from their cloud providers who keep increasing their service offerings and/or software catalog. Stories of massive cloud providers suddenly having similar solutions, or marketing competitive solutions to their customers end users have IP sensitive organizations looking for a provider that is not also a massive software developer.
Egenera's cloud business is a month-to-month service with no upfront costs or revenue commitments, so we earn our customers business over and over again. We feel that the best measure of our cloud's performance is not our 99.999% availability but the fact that over 93% of our partners have been with us for more than 4 years. If one or more of the challenges above ring true for you then go to www.egenera.com to schedule a demo or sign up as a partner to test our cloud yourself. Let us show you how Egenera really can make reselling cloud simple.