Technology stack – One of the key deciding factors in choosing a platform was the compatibility of the technology stack.  For many of our SaaS projects, we port or repurpose existing code from on-premises products that were written on .NET.  Moving this to Windows Azure was more frictionless than completely re-writing our code for a platform that does not support .NET.  Our Windows management development teams can continue to develop on a technology stack they already are familiar with.  For our non-Windows teams, Windows Azure exposes its APIs via standards-based protocols (HTTP/REST), and, therefore, supports applications written in a variety of programming languages.

Datacenter availability – Our customer base is global in nature and we need a cloud platform that can guarantee a global reach.  Microsoft has Windows Azure datacenters in North America, Europe and Asia Pacific, so we knew we could expand the markets for our products with no infrastructure concerns on our end.  We were able to launch the product in North America datacenters initially, and then deploy additional instances to European datacenters as soon as our business was ready.

Ability to scale – Initially, we positioned our SaaS offerings with small and mid-sized companies, under the assumption that they would be least likely to want to invest in the resources and hardware necessary to host on-premises software.  However, we’ve seen equal interest from larger companies who want to move thousands of mailboxes between mail platforms.  With Windows Azure, we have the agility to deploy additional compute instances, and scale up workloads to meet increasing customer demands.  In some cases, we’ve added hundreds of compute instances to support large migrations.  The experience is seamless for our customers using the product.

Guaranteed uptime – With SaaS products, the burden of maintaining the software is lifted from the end user, but is transferred instead to the vendor, who is responsible for ensuring availability of the product.  Uptime commitments are important, particularly for time-sensitive projects like migrations.  The Windows Azure platform helps us satisfy guaranteed uptime for our customers through infrastructure monitoring and redundancy.  Windows Azure monitors the underlying infrastructure and spins up new instances if there are problems detected with an existing compute resource.  It also ensures data redundancy through replication, with at least three copies of all data hosted on their platform.  In a worst case scenario, Quest also hosts instances of the application in multiple Windows Azure datacenters.

Proven vendor – Technology and feature set were a large part of our decision to build products on Windows Azure, but given the investment we were making, it was important to choose a vendor we knew would always be there.  Microsoft’s all-in strategy behind Windows Azure gave us confidence that they would continue to invest in the infrastructure and platform, and continue to help us meet the business and technical objectives I have discussed above.
Whether you are considering moving your products, or building news ones on cloud platforms, you want to spend the majority of your resources and attention on your core competencies, not on infrastructure.  Regardless of the platform you choose, if you carefully consider these aspects when evaluating the alternatives, you will be well positioned to launch your own SaaS products.

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About the Author
Shawn Barker has been a senior product manager at Quest Software for eight years.  He has worked with IT administrators in companies of all sizes to understand their systems management challenges, and with Quest R&D teams to build Active Directory and Windows Management solutions that solve these challenges.  More recently, Shawn has overseen the release of Quest OnDemand, a collection of web-based services that allow Quest to rapidly launch new cloud-based products to address customer problems without the need for software deployment.