Enabling The Transition From Packaged Software To SaaS Delivery
Enabling The Transition From Packaged Software To SaaS Delivery
Company Profile
Thunderhead.com is a UK headquartered global software company that delivers customer communications software. Thunderhead.com opens up new opportunities by transforming your customer experience – increasing engagement, building loyalty and driving revenue.
The Problem
Thunderhead.com found that they could unlock a large business opportunity by delivering versions of their applications as SaaS in addition to selling them as on- premises enterprise software.
Thunderhead.com needed to host their applications in self owned equipment due to regulatory and compliance reasons. Looking at their options, they decided to build a private cloud infrastructure that would be responsive to the elastic needs of a modern SaaS application.
The infrastructure needed to be:
- Production ready today
- Simple to deploy, grow, and operate over time
- API driven so that their application management code could properly automate the growth and maintenance of the application
- Supported by an enterprise focused development, testing, and support team
The Solution
With Nimbula Director, the team was able to deploy a private cloud to host the Thuderhead.com applications
- Nimbula Director’s API-driven, elastic system allowed them to automate their software stack and have it respond to changing demand and environmental conditions.
- Nimbula Director’s zero-touch model for installation and growth eliminated much of the operational pains associated with infrastructure for SaaS applications
- Nimbula Director’s hardened cloud platform complete with auto-healing control plane provided the enterprise readiness and cloud uptime they needed to run.
In addition, Nimbula’s dedication to Thunderhead’s success and responsive field and support teams made sure that the project was a success without the need for huge consulting and integration costs.
Why Nimbula?
Thunderhead.com evaluated many Nimbula competitors to see if they also met their needs. Some systems were brittle or hard to install. Others were not sufficiently API driven and did not offer much automation options. Others were based on a perpetual license model and didn’t offer commercial value in a SaaS deployment and billing model. Nimbula Director was the only product that Thunderhead.com felt was capable today to host a production SaaS application within these constraints.
Highlights:
- Elastic, API driven infrastructure enabled the automation of the Thunderhead.com application suite as a SaaS hosted service
- No need for dedicated cloud controllers allows to create cloud with minimum of 4 compute nodes, this allows use of all available cores to run VM’s giving more usable capacity on smaller clouds
- Support for separate Virtual Ethernet LANs that gives greater flexibility when implementing networking with Nimbula, and aids compliance controls.
- Nimbula Director’s enterprise readiness, reliability, and control plane automation delivered the required uptime with the lowest possible operations costs
- Nimbula Director was competitively priced with a subscription model and included excellent pre-sales and post-sales support which helped make sure that Thunderhead.com would be successful