Speeding up SaaS deployments with Platform.sh

Organizations spend an inordinate amount of time and resources developing and maintaining infrastructure, which distracts from what should be their core focus: providing customers with valuable and engaging applications and digital experiences. Platform.sh allows companies to direct their attention towards accomplishing this primary goal by relieving them of the burden of building teams to manage tooling, servers, containers and cloud infrastructure as well as the capital expenditures needed to launch new lines of business. With the launch of Platform.sh’s new white-label platform, software companies and SaaS entrepreneurs can transform their existing on-premise software or build new SaaS businesses in a matter of weeks.

We spoke to Chris Yates, vice president of marketing, Platform.sh to learn more.

ADM: What did Platform.sh previously provide customers in terms of branded PaaS and SaaS offerings?

Yates: At Platform.sh we built our development workflow and deployment tools in a forward-looking way. Using robust APIs we were able to create an offering that could be adapted easily to a wide variety of Cloud partners (like AWS, Orange, and Microsoft) and software stacks (PHP, Python, Node.js, Java, etc.). Not only that, but our architectural foundations offered us the flexibility to work with partners to provide them with the raw materials for a branded OEM solution. Beginning in 2016 Platform.sh enabled partners to leverage our product to provide the cloud back-end for their own PaaS and SaaS offerings of their software.

ADM: What is NEW and DIFFERENT that this white label offering delivers?

Yates: In two words, speed and expertise. First, based on our experience with early partners like Magento Commerce, Platform.sh has developed additional tooling to enable partners to deploy their software offering as a service in days rather than months (or years if they did it themselves). We’ve simplified the tooling for creating a complete branded experience that their customers interact with from the Web user interface to the command line and API. We’ve also released updated APIs allowing partners to quickly interface their business tools with the Platform.sh billing and provisioning systems to seamlessly manage their customer experience.

Working with the premier open source and eCommerce software companies in the world has also given Platform.sh a unique viewpoint on how to help move from on-prem deployment to true single- and multi-tenant SaaS both from a technical and business operations perspective. This expertise is invaluable to organizations undergoing a business evolution.

ADM: Do any competitors offer an equivalent/similar solution?

Yates: Platform.sh is uniquely positioned to offer a SaaS factory offering - unlike competitors, our white label SaaS factory provides a fully white-labeled solution out of the box, including billing, support, and technology. Furthermore, it’s built on top of the unique core features of Platform.sh that allow aspiring SaaS companies to reduce or altogether eliminate DevOps investment  - composable infrastructure that allows services to be managed in a couple lines of configuration, a git-driven deployment model that allows for instant cloning of environments, and our “batteries included” approach, where database and storage services all snap together seamlessly.

ADM: What challenges does this new offering solve?

Yates: Software companies have a lot to focus on. They have to build a compelling application, formulate a winning go-to-market strategy, and execute on customer success. On top of that, to deliver their software as a service, generating recurring revenue instead of traditional licenses and professional services, they have to develop or hire for a host of new skills to cloud-enable their business, re-architect their app to support multitenancy, not to mention operate all this complexity at scale.

The Platform.sh white-label SaaS factory approach enables creators to focus on their software, their go-to-market, and most importantly, their customers.

ADM: How does the new offering impact day-to-day IT operations?

Yates: For IT pros and software developers, the Platform.sh white-label SaaS factory allows for a focus on technology services and code that serves the customer directly and provides the value the customer sees. Instead of spending 20-40% of an engineering team’s overall capacity on infrastructure and DevOps, that effort can be put towards driving feature roadmap evolution in the software offering itself. IT and dev pros are given both the control over their offering, as well as the freedom to focus on what matters most for customers.

ADM: How does the new offering impact a company’s bottom line?

Yates: A great case study is a small Platform.sh software development partner. They have developed and deployed an application that serves over 90 well-known international brands with no operations or DevOps team. They run on Platform.sh for under $4,000 per month.

ADM: What kind of companies will likely adopt the white label platform?

Yates: Our partners range from leading open-source companies like Magento, eZ Systems, and Sencio to cloud companies like Orange, to a host of budding SaaS entrepreneurs like the one mentioned above. Platform.sh white-label SaaS factory offers a low-cost, low-friction pathway to delivering great software as a service, with minimal upfront investment, and no re-architecture of the application required.

ADM: What are some of the results customers have achieved using the white label platform?

Yates: Well, the success of Magento Commerce in the marketplace and its recent acquisition (for $1.68B) by Adobe speaks for itself. Moreover, companies large and small can get started moving from license to SaaS business models in record time - days, not years.

About Chris Yates

Chris Yates is the VP of Marketing at Platform.sh, but an engineer and product developer at heart. Prior to Platform.sh, Chris held roles in product and engineering leadership at Toast, the leading Cloud-based Point-of-Sale company, and Acquia, where he served teams building SaaS personalization and content delivery platforms. In a past life, he developed software for NASA.