Feature Story

By Kat Rollin

August 5, 2008 — Many software vendors are investigating on demand delivery models or Software as a Service (SaaS) to protect intellectual property and create an ongoing revenue stream, as well as to reduce the customer's burden of infrastructure maintenance and support. But how do you go from your existing on-premise model to an on-demand model as quickly, cost-effectively, and efficiently as possible? USi, an AT&T company, has the experience, best practices, and hosting services to help you transform your on-premise application to a SaaS offering, at a fraction of the cost and go-to-market time of doing it in-house.

The Challenge Facing Traditional Data Warehouses

The faster you can analyze data to make decisions and optimize the overall efficiency of your business, the faster you can impact revenue and increase profits. Traditional data warehouses, designed to run planned reports or standard queries, are struggling under growing the demand for on-the-fly, ad hoc, complex queries with data coming from multiple data sources. These data warehouses require extensive design and ongoing management — including the need to partition and index data, which explodes 10 TB of real data into 20 to 50 TB, and requires IT to build new indices to support new queries. The usual solution is to throw more hardware at the problem, escalating the cost of the entire BI solution including IT and datacenter resources..

One Stop Shop for All of Your On Demand Needs

USi offers one stop shopping for all of your on demand needs, with innovative Sun virtualization technologies like Solaris ZFS and Solaris Containers, plus pay-as-you-grow scalability, and SaaS enablement services This helps you try out an on demand model and eventually move to a complete and scalable SaaS hosting solution — when you're ready.

Leveraging the Sun Solaris On Demand Program sandbox and virtualization models, USi offers a range of managed hosting for SaaS delivery to help you develop a solution with the following benefits for you and your customers:

• Lower costs and minimal investment in technology
• Faster time-to-market
• Reduced software deployment complexity
• Increased ability to focus on business objectives
• Ability to easily scale as application demand increases
• Increased competitive advantage

USi SaaS Enablement Services

Through its TopLineISV Program, USi offers much more than hosting and IT infrastructure services. USi's unique SaaS enablement service helps you avoid common mis-steps and more quickly gain a competitive advantage. Whether you're just curious about SaaS or ready to go into production, USi has the tools you need:

• TopLineISV Incubation Center — Free sandbox and expert services let you test and refine your technical architecture following best practices to avoid pitfalls, while keeping business objectives in mind. Includes free production-quality sandbox hosting for up to three months, one day technical design workshop (flat fee), blueprint of technical requirements, and full support services
• TopLineISV JumpStart — A low-risk pilot version of the TopLineISV SaaS Enablement program that lets you test the waters before deciding to enter the SaaS space. You can take advantage up to four months hosting of a full production instance of your application at discounted pricing, leverage TopLineISV program marketing and sales support, and develop a pipeline of SaaS clients before you invest in hosting
• TopLineISV — Complete SaaS enablement solutions, including utility hosting, fully managed hosting infrastructure, support, and the TopLineISV Program. To help you realize immediate benefits, USi offers a choice of services from business strategy consulting, to remote to fully managed hosting solutions, to highly available disaster recovery.
• TopLineISV Partner Program — In preparation for deploying your SaaS model and after the launch, USi offers vast experience and support services in marketing, sales, operations, and technology to help you continually deliver your products to the marketplace.

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.