EBOOK
THE SECRETS
TO WINNING
THE CLOUD GAME
- By Charles Araujo
Principal Analyst, Intellyx
SPONSORED BY
EBOOK
THE SECRETS TO WINNING THE CLOUD GAME
The Secrets to Winning the Cloud Game
Moving from a traditional on-premises delivery model to a cloudbased, Software-as-a-Service strategy is a high-stakes, bet-thecompany game for independent software vendors
— these are the secrets to winning it all
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THE SECRETS TO WINNING THE CLOUD GAME
It’s a High Stakes Game, So Be at the Table
It’s time to put your chips on the table and get in the game.
As an independent software vendor, you are now living in a clouddriven world — whether you like it or not. But the move from an onpremises deployment model to a cloud-based, Software-as-a-Service
approach is more involved than you may realize.
Here’s the most important thing to know as you saddle up to the
table: from here on out there is no such thing as a purely
technical decision.
In the pre-cloud world, it was a little clearer. The development team
created the product. The sales and marketing team sold the product.
The support team deployed and supported the product after the
sale. Then in a few years, you repeated the entire process all over
again.
In the cloud-driven SaaS world, everything has been turned
upside down. Every decision will now span strategic, technical and
operational dimensions — and it means that you need to saddle up
and take a seat at the table. This is your hand to play.
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This Game is Played by a
Different Set of Rules
It’s tempting to think that you’re just playing the same game, but with
a different deck of cards. You’re not. There is an entirely different set
of rules to this game.
Moving from an on-premises deployment model to a cloud-driven
SaaS approach is about much more than just employing a new
delivery model. It’s a fundamental shift in how you do business.
If you don’t want to lose it all on the first hand, you need to
understand how to play this game — and you must realize that this
new SaaS business model will impact everything from your revenue
stream to your architectural complexity to how you approach
customer retention and satisfaction.
You can’t afford to take anything for granted. If you want to come out
on top, you need to start at the beginning and understand the new
rules by the time you place your first bet.
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You’re Going All In
The first thing that you need to understand is
that you’re going all in!
You can’t place a few tepid bets to see what
happens. To be competitive in the SaaS world
means an entirely new business model —
and that means a fundamental shift in your
revenue and profit stream.
With the on-premises approach, you received
large cash infusions up front. In the SaaS
world, a smaller, but steady stream of income
replaces those large, up-front cash receipts.
You know this, but have you fully considered
the ramifications of this new revenue model
— and the fact that customers will be able
to switch more readily — on your business
operations?
At the same time, you’ll need to invest heavily
in an entirely new infrastructure to support
your new business model. That’s quite a
double-down bet: less cash up front and
a greater capital outlay to fund your new
infrastructure.
Push those chips into the pot. You’re all in!
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THE SECRETS TO WINNING THE CLOUD GAME
Mastering the Secrets
to a Winning Hand
The good news is that there are a few secrets to
building a winning hand that makes your all-in
bet a bit less risky.
The big secret is understanding that there is no
simple, one-dimensional technique for winning
this game. In this game, everything matters.
You can’t win by focusing on any single card.
You need to put it all together — from the
application, to the database, to the infrastructure
— to build your winning hand.
When we said that there is no purely
technical decision, we meant it. Each card
matters. It’s how you assemble your hand
— how you put all the pieces together as
you prepare to move from an on-premises
strategy to a SaaS model — that is the
difference between winning and losing the
game.
The question is: how do you put together
your winning hand? Well, it’s your lucky day,
because we’ve got the answer.
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THE SECRETS TO WINNING THE CLOUD GAME
Your Ace in the Hole: Agility
Everyone knows that a winning hand starts with your ace in
the hole.
For software companies making the shift to a SaaS model,
that ace is agility.
You need to be able to pivot rapidly as your customers’
needs and desires change. A funny thing happens when
you make the move from on-premises to SaaS: customer
expectations change. They suddenly expect you to move
faster and to change more quickly.
And they expect you to help them leverage your product
to create their own agility as they attempt to compete in a
market that is moving ever faster.
To meet this demand, you need to design your product
architecture with agility in mind – yours and your customers.
That’s your ace in the hole.
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THE SECRETS TO WINNING THE CLOUD GAME
The King: Time to Market
Speaking of speed, let’s talk about the king in your winning
hand: Time-to-Market.
You’re not the only one making the move to the cloud. So
are all of your competitors. How you make the move — and
doing it better and faster than your competitors — is going
to be a critical part of putting together your winning hand.
Keeping up with your competition is great. But let’s call a
spade a spade: you need to do more than just keep up
— you need to beat your competitors to the punch. Over
and over again.
As you move to the cloud, your ability to deliver faster
— not just your first cloud release, but every release
thereafter — will make you the ruler of the game.
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The Queen Smiles Favorably
When Her Customers are Happy
Despite the importance of the King, this game isn’t all about
speed. That’s only part of the winning hand – all of your
cards need to come together to win. Agility and time to
market won’t matter if you don’t delight your customers.
The challenge for you is that in the world of cloud, your
customers will take their losses and switch to a competitor
at the first sign of trouble. It’s not enough to just be fast-tomarket. You also need to thrill and delight your customers at
every turn — so they double-down on a winning hand with
you instead.
In this game, retention is the queen in your hand — and the
queen favors those who keep her subjects happy.
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THE SECRETS TO WINNING THE CLOUD GAME
The move to a cloud-driven world has left your customers
fickle. They won’t hesitate to jump ship the moment they
believe you aren’t meeting their needs.
Keep your customers happy by ensuring continuous
availability of your platform or service and by delivering
competition-beating performance on a consistent basis.
Are you ready for this?
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THE SECRETS TO WINNING THE CLOUD GAME
The “Jack of All Trades”
You’re drawing to the royal flush, but you’re not there yet.
You’ve got the agility, the time-to-market, and the customer
retention. But how you put that into action is all critical to
building your winning your hand. That’s why you need your
‘Jack of all trades’: flexibility.
In a cloud-driven world, nothing is certain, and change is the
only constant. That’s why flexibility is so important.
You need flexible deployment options. You need the ability
to mix operational and analytical transactions to make rapid,
real-time decisions. You need to be able to leverage different
infrastructure elements based on the criticality and the
demands of the workloads running on them.
Flexibility is what makes the other cards work. But it’s not
automatic. You need to plan for it and protect it.
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THE SECRETS TO WINNING THE CLOUD GAME
Numbers Still Count
The face cards may get all the glory, but it’s the ‘10 card’ that
brings the winning hand home. Even in the game of cloud,
numbers still count.
In the rush to get into the game, it’s easy to overspend —
especially on the wrong things. If you don’t pay attention to
the numbers, you can easily find yourself in a hole you can’t
climb out of before it’s too late.
The trick to winning this game is to bet smartly. You may be
all in, but that doesn’t mean that you have to bet big on the
first hand.
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THE SECRETS TO WINNING THE CLOUD GAME
Playing to win means thinking about the future. Invest in an
infrastructure that can grow when your revenue grows, and
you’ll always have a comfortable lead. Put all your chips down
on expensive infrastructure before you need it, and you’ll be
out of the game fast.
You need to focus on consistently lowering your cost of both
ownership and operation and ensuring that you’re placing
bets that will give you the greatest flexibility in the future.
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THE SECRETS TO WINNING THE CLOUD GAME
Your Royal Flush
It may seem daunting, but you can win the
cloud game — and it doesn’t require luck. You
just need to build your winning hand.
It won’t happen by accident. Every decision
— no matter how technical it may seem — will
matter. That’s why you need to be at the table
and be actively involved. The stakes are just
too big to be left to the technical team alone.
When you go to assemble your winning hand,
one thing will become abundantly clear: you’ll
need a collection of cloud-focused solutions
— like NuoDB — to pull it off.
To compete in the cloud-driven, SaaS world, you
need agility, rapid time-to-market, high customer
retention rates, flexibility, and cost-effectiveness.
One area that affects every card in your royal
flush is the database. Using a database like
NuoDB, designed specifically for this purpose,
is the only way to deliver these capabilities.
It’s the Royal Flush you need to win the game.
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THE SECRETS TO WINNING THE CLOUD GAME
About Charles Araujo
Charles Araujo is an industry analyst, internationally recognized
authority on the Digital Enterprise and author of The Quantum Age
of IT: Why Everything You Know About IT is About to Change.
As Principal Analyst with Intellyx, he writes, speaks and advises
organizations on how to navigate through this time of disruption.
He is also the founder of The Institute for Digital Transformation
and a sought after keynote speaker. He writes a regular column
for IDG and NetworkWorld, has been a regular contributor to both
InformationWeek and CIO Insight and has been quoted or published
in Time, CIO, Computerworld, USA Today and Forbes.
About Intellyx
Intellyx is the first and only industry analysis, advisory, and training
firm focused on agile digital transformation.
Intellyx works with enterprise digital professionals to cut through
technology buzzwords and connect the dots between the customer
and the technology – to provide the vision, the business case, and
the architecture for agile digital transformation initiatives.
Text copyright © Intellyx LLC. As of the time of writing, NuoDB is an Intellyx customer.
None of the other organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers.
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Next Steps
As you’ve seen in this ebook, database selection
can have both financial and strategic implications
for software as a service companies and software
vendors moving to a service model.
To learn more about the financial impact of database
selection, visit www.nuodb.com/financial-impact
About NuoDB
NuoDB’s elastic SQL database for cloud applications
helps customers get applications to market faster
and reduce their total cost of ownership. Software
vendors and ecommerce companies rely on
NuoDB to obtain the combination of scale-out
simplicity, elasticity, and continuous availability that
cloud applications require, with the transactional
consistency and durability that databases of record
demand.
As a result, customers can capitalize on modern
technologies such as cloud computing and
containerization to ensure their applications are
ready for today’s evolving expectations, as well as
any future requirements.
NuoDB is headquartered in Cambridge, MA, USA,
with offices in Dublin and Belfast.
For more information, visit nuodb.com.
© 2017 NuoDB, Inc., all rights reserved.
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