Introduction: Facing the SaaS Dilemma
For legacy ISVs delivering applications through Citrix or RDS, the shift to SaaS can be a lengthy and daunting journey. While SaaS startups have the immediate advantage of cloud-native architecture, legacy ISVs face dramatic changes to their business model. Often decades of product development features, combined with lengthy customer relationships, mean everything seems to resist change.
The pressure to adapt is growing, driven by cloud adoption, remote work, and changing customer expectations. For many ISVs, moving to a fully re-platformed SaaS model will eventually become necessary—but it takes time. SaaS-enabling your current application provides a faster way to modernize incrementally while extending the life of existing software.
SaaS enablement usually requires delivering your application from a centralized datacenter using technologies like RDS, Citrix, or similar solutions. This allows you to offer some of the benefits of the cloud without a complete re-platforming effort. It is still technically complex, requires significant infrastructure and investment, and demands different skill sets for operational management and support. Despite this, many ISVs have taken this path, often hitting major operational challenges, mainly due to the inability for customers to manage their own deployments of the software. All of the usual tasks associated with managing the software are placed on the ISV, who may not have the systems or tools needed to efficiently manage at scale.
The Hidden Challenge: Manual Setups Are Costly and Risky
Manually setting up customers, users, and applications in a traditional Windows Server environment is costly, error-prone, and risky. Service providers and ISVs attempting this process often face complexity: configurations must be precise, customizations need to be maintained, and human intervention during updates introduces the risk of errors. These challenges often lead to delays, frustrated customers, and expensive rework. When dealing with many thousands of customers and users, typical manual processes become unsustainable and unaffordable, especially as the scale of deployment grows.
Standardisation, Precision, Control, Repeatability, Auditing, Billing – These all become important.
A Practical Approach: Automation for SaaS-Enabling Existing Applications
For ISVs delivering via Citrix or RDS, automating the setup and delivery of applications offers a practical way to transition towards SaaS. Using a platform like Atria can automate the setup of customers, users, and applications, making these processes faster, more scalable, and more reliable. This approach provides several immediate benefits:
- Reduced Complexity: Atria’s flexible structure can adapt to a wide range of customer-specific requirements, reducing setup errors and ensuring smooth onboarding.
- Time and Resource Savings: Automation reduces time spent on repetitive tasks, allowing your team to focus on more strategic activities.
- Improved Accuracy: Automation also means fewer manual errors, leading to more consistent and reliable results.
Service providers using Atria have successfully scaled operations to tens of thousands of end-customers, providing both their core applications and complementary services like Microsoft 365.
Key Benefits of Automating with Atria
- Cost Efficiency: By automating manual processes, service providers can reduce labor costs dramatically and minimize costly mistakes.
- Improved Customer Experience: Faster, error-free setups lead to smoother onboarding experiences for customers.
- Scalability: Atria’s automation capabilities allow ISVs to serve more customers without increasing administrative burdens.
- Comprehensive Features: Beyond setup, Atria supports notifications, SPLA license reporting and user self-service, simplifying ongoing operations.
Conclusion: Automation as a Path to Modernization
Transitioning to SaaS does not have to require starting from scratch. Automation can bridge the gap between legacy and modern delivery, allowing ISVs to overcome the challenges of manual setups while retaining their valuable products and customer relationships. This balanced approach modernizes delivery while preserving the history and trust that customers have in your product. Whether directly or through partners, Atria can help you navigate the challenges of SaaS-enablement, enabling your business to stay competitive in a cloud-driven world. If you’re interested in discussing how to modernize your legacy application, we’re here for a candid conversation about your needs. Let’s explore whether Atria can be part of your solution. How we can help:
- If you are an ISV hosting your own application we can support your operations with Atria, we have migrated and can support any application delivery platform (Citrix, RDS, Parallels)
- We can connect you with an Atria powered Service Provider in your region, that can offer a turnkey application delivery solution for your software, including tenant and user management, self-service and channel support.
- If you are an MSP or Datacenter provider who supports ISVs, we can help you provide a differentiated and more valuable service with automation.
We enjoy solving complex problems and helping service providers succeed. If you’d like to have an informal, no-pressure conversation about your challenges, feel free to reach out. We’ll be honest about how we can help, and if we can’t, we’ll say so and do our best to point you in the right direction.
