Business agility

Transforming into SaaS accelerates time to market and innovation. This becomes possible thanks to short development cycles and faster delivery, which in turn enable quick response to a customer and market needs. But to unlock the maximum potential, the architecture of SaaS application should be aligned with the business model. Below, we consider several architectural dimensions that can impact business agility.

Tenancy model enables SaaS providers to achieve agility by standardising and sharing infrastructure across customers. Standardisation simplifies infrastructure management by treating every tenant similarly, while the shared approach allows rapid scaling, as new tenants can be onboarded without the need to provision dedicated infrastructure.

Tenant operations also noticeably affect business agility. Multiple tenants with varying operational needs create complexity that can undermine the agility. However, standardised operations with robust automation allow SaaS providers to efficiently manage thousands of customers whilst maintaining agility and innovation.

Development cycle with frequent releases enable SaaS providers to catch up with market opportunities rapidly. Leading SaaS providers can push features to production multiple times per day, allowing quick response to customer feedback or competitive threats. In contrast, long release cycles create significant delays between identifying opportunities and delivering solutions, potentially causing providers to miss market windows or lose customers to more agile competitors.

Tenant resource management affects how quickly SaaS providers can deploy updates and new features. Well designed resource management allows SaaS providers to push update once and immediately benefit all tenants. Poorly implemented resource management may require individual deployments per tenant, dramatically slowing features rollout and bug fixes. This deployment friction can undermine business agility, preventing rapid responses to market change and customer needs.

Business agility is a key characteristic that organisations strive to achieve when transitioning to a SaaS model. It allows them to respond rapidly to changing market conditions and customer needs. This agility helps businesses maintain a strong competitive advantage in a dynamic business environment.