Feature Story

By Kat Rollin

January 29, 2008 — Are your customers demanding that you deliver your application on demand so they don't have to bear the cost of managing the infrastructure? Like many software vendors, you might be investigating delivering your products in a subscription model, but just like your customers, you don't want to manage the infrastructure either.

And you might have been told that you must re-architect your applications to run in a multi-tenancy environment. As Callidus Software found out, you don't have to do either when you work with Sun's Solaris On Demand program. You can quickly make the transition to Software as a Service (SaaS) with your existing application — with no up front costs.

Callidus Software goes on demand with help from Sun

For more than 10 years, Callidus Software has been producing sales performance management (SPM) solutions globally for companies across a broad range of industries. Callidus Software's SPM solution helps its customers to strategically manage incentive payments to employees, distributors, brokers, and channel partners.

In 2006, the Callidus Software customer base started demanding a SaaS solution. It was clear from the start that Callidus Software wanted to focus their valuable internal resources on delivering software, not managing IT operations. Callidus Software started investigating platforms and managed services partners to deploy their new subscription service. "We choose Sun because more than half of our customer base gave positive feedback on the Sun platform", said Jeff Saling, vice president of Callidus On-Demand at Callidus Software. "Additionally, the Callidus Software development environment was based on Sun and because of Sun's ability and desire to partner with us in this new venture."

Together, Sun and Callidus Software developed an innovative on demand solution where Sun manages the servers and networks, and Callidus Software manages its applications. Sun helped Callidus Software migrate to the Solaris 10 Operating System to take advantage of Solaris Containers and robust security features. Jointly, Sun and Callidus Software also developed a proof of concept (POC) where they fine-tuned the platforms (Sun Fire E6900, X4600, and X4200 servers) to cost-effectively meet various processing needs, increase utilization, and build in redundancy.

In just five months, the POC evolved into the production environment with the first customer in August 2006. A year and a half later, Callidus On-Demand supports over 44,000 subscribers from more than 120 countries. High availability, security, and cost are key factors to continued growth. The Sun server infrastructure averages 99.96 percent availability and eight servers with 135 Solaris Containers enabling security between customers. The virtualized environment results in 75 percent utilization, for an operational cost savings of almost 50 percent compared to the on-premise model — a savings that Callidus Software passes on to its customers. Callidus Software expects to leverage the excellent reliability and innovations in the Sun platform to continue refining their subscription service, augmenting disaster recovery capabilities, and delivering services from Europe.

Sun's Solaris On Demand Program for ISVs

The Solaris On Demand program for ISVS is designed to help you move your application to a SaaS model, with your choice of hosting options and without changing your code. The program also offers a free 90-day sandbox — so you can get up and running, tested, and selling with no up-front costs — as well as a customized go-to-market plan to help create demand.

The Solaris On Demand program enables you to host your application with one of Sun's hosting partners, your existing datacenter location, or in-house. You focus on selling, supporting, and enhancing your application, while Sun and Sun's partners focus on making sure the infrastructure meets and exceeds availability and security guarantees. As well, Sun and its partners can help you to architect your on demand infrastructure to meet the specific needs of your application using Solaris software and SPARC, AMD Opteron, or Intel Xeon processor-based servers, storage, and networking, Sun also offers increased security and the level of high availability you require.

On demand without re-architecting
Is your application architected single-tenancy? Are you wondering if you have to re-architect to multi-tenancy to get into the SaaS market?

With the Solaris On Demand program for ISVs, you can offer your single-tenant application on demand now without re-architecting -- by taking advantage of Solaris 10's built-in virtualization capability. Something Sun calls virtualized-tenancy. In fact, you can use the same code base for both your on- and off-premise offerings, creating a great differentiation for you in the marketplace while also minimizing your support costs.

In the Solaris on demand environment, each customer runs its own instance of your software in their own set of secure Solaris Containers. You don't have to worry about maintaining security between customers because Solaris Containers do it for you. In fact, it's more secure than a multi-tenancy model where multiple customers might share the same database services or other services.

The Solaris on demand environment can also lower computing costs for you and your customers by increasing utilization. In traditional hosting services, each customer is assigned its own system and storage, which are often under utilized, so you pay for resources you don't use. The Solaris on demand environment can be sized for exact needs and more resources can be dynamically added as demand increases. So you only pay for the resources you need.

Take advantage of our free POC environment

To help you get started, the Solaris On Demand program offers the ISV Sandbox — a free proof of concept (POC) environment where you can test your application in a virtualized-tenancy environment and understand new business models before committing to on demand. The free environment includes hosting, hardware, managed services, reporting 99.5 percent guaranteed uptime SLA, and backup.

If your customers are requesting on demand, but you've been holding back because of concerns of managing datacenters or re-writing code, you don't have to wait any longer. As we teamed with Callidus Software, the Solaris On Demand program for ISVs can help you partner with Sun to quickly deploy your application in a SaaS model — with no up-front costs. Sun helps you architect the infrastructure, lets you test it out, helps you determine what to charge for subscriptions, and helps you market your new service. With Sun, you can pioneer your new on demand services — today.

Formerly a systems engineer for Sun, Kat Rollin now reports on partner solutions for sun.com and develops technical marketing communications for the technology industry.