Enterprise Ready is a small guide for building the features that enterprises love. In this guide, every feature is broken down, so you know the importance of every feature and its implementation. It struggles with what features to build help attract enterprise customers.
Tips to become Enterprise Ready
The adherent 11 categories were identified as the common enterprise differentiating features. Every feature escort includes context for why it is needed, a jumping-off point for implementing your own and links to teardowns of example implementations.
Project Framework
What is it?
A guide to creating or enhancing a SaaS product with common features that will enable more adoption by enterprise customers.
Who it is for?
When you are defining your SaaS product and overall strategy, an absolute key is knowing exactly who you’re building it for. Enterprise Ready was created for the people who build SaaS products (founders, product managers, and engineering team leads) to change the enterprise software narrative from “how to SELL to the enterprise” to “how to BUILD for the enterprise”.
Who it is from?
A company called Replicated that enables SaaS application to create an enterprise installable version of their product to be distributed behind the firewall. We work closely with many SaaS founders and teams. We’ve built and sold a SaaS company previously. In order to be successful with the Replicated platform, SaaS companies generally need a baseline of features that enterprise customers want. We’ve led the charge on much of the content, but we’ve been lucky to have contributors like the teams at Segment and TIBCO Jaspersoft to contribute to areas where they’re experts.
Why we’re contributing it?
Hopefully, this site can create a common vernacular for founders, product managers, engineers, sales and customers alike. We're product people. So, we're changing the enterprise software narrative from "how to SELL to the enterprise" to "how to BUILD for the enterprise." You can fork it, create edits, share it with your team and even contribute those back.
The Key Ingredients to Building Enterprise SaaS
Even though the days of undergoing lengthy and complex IT projects are still around, the tide is certainly turning towards building software via a lean and agile approach. The huge majority of conversation regarding enterprise software is focused on the efforts required to sell it, but there is a very little conversation about the art and effort of building software for enterprise buyers. We are people product, so we decided to start an open-source content project to share the technical requirements for building for the enterprise.
Why enterprise features?
Enterprise companies have many employees (scale) and significant existing business to protect (risk). In the first place, enterprises require different features from small and medium-sized companies due to Risk and Scale.
Enterprises will pay more for features that allow them to decrease risk and operate at scale. In addition, most of these features are too advanced for small businesses to want or need. Resulting, only exposing these features to enterprise customers and are better of maintaining a simplified experience for small businesses.
Enterprise Deployment Options
As discussed in our overview of the various deployment options that are available to SaaS vendors, many large enterprises will ask for a private instance of an application. They might be looking for a single tenant instance that you host and manage. Or they might be looking for a full on-prem, air-gapped server installation… or anything in between. Ultimately, you’ll want to be able to deliver a version of your application that can be deployed anywhere.
Common Enterprise feature
The fastest-growing SaaS application is customers, our team at Replicated relied on our expertise to help formulate the initial thesis about what features most enterprises required. Since the Replicated platform currently enables over 40 SaaS companies to deploy and manage on-prem, private instances of their applications to over 500 different enterprise customers.
Security & Compliance
Ensuring that only those who need to know, access data and applications. Regulatory and other compliance requirements are putting a large amount of pressure on applications to incorporate more security capabilities. As an ISV, when you deploy your application via SaaS versus deploying on-premise it presents not only technical challenges from a security perspective, but introduces a certain amount of the FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) factor from your tenants who need to be assured that their data can't accidentally fall into the hands of other tenants.
Multi-tenancy
Multi-tenancy is all about improving scalability and reducing costs by running multiple customers or tenants on a single instance of your application in such a way that they each believe that they are executing in isolation. It's all about sharing of resources. When you consider the infrastructure tier, database tier, an application logic tier of your application environment, there is actually more than one way of doing multi-tenancy because you may provide more sharing at one level and less sharing at another, so we can talk about degrees of multi-tenancy depending on how much sharing you do at each level.