Business growth

The ability to grow faster is one of the key drivers that pushing software companies to transform into a SaaS business model. SaaS enables growth through smoother customer acquisition, lower operational costs, and easier entry into new markets. However, to successfully support this business growth, a SaaS application should be aligned with the business model across the following architectural dimensions.

Tenant identity management determines how users are identified in a multi-tenant SaaS application and has direct impact to the ability to enter certain countries or market segments. For example, if your customers are other organisations your tenant identity management system will likely require the ability to federate with their corporate identity providers. Additionally, in many countries and industries your identity management should comply with regulatory standards.

Tenant onboarding is one of the SaaS capabilities that streamlines customer acquisition. Depending on how many tenants business needs to onboard annually, it may require to design the onboarding process differently. For example, if the business needs to onboard one customer in a couple of years, the business will require a completely different onboarding process compared to a business that needs to onboard thousands of customers annually.

Tenancy model determines how tenants' resources are deployed. In a traditional software model applications are usually deployed for each tenant separately. Very often, software providers transitioning to a SaaS business model move applications to the SaaS provider’s infrastructure but keep the tenancy model unchanged. This can limit the ability to expand into new market segments, as the cost of each installation often restricts access to smaller customers. To unlock business growth, the tenancy model should align with the market expansion strategy.

Tenant resource management should allow to effectively provision tenants' resources and keep them up to date. It includes maintaining the same version of application for all tenants. Poorly implemented it can limit the ability to grow customer base. SaaS business model assumes that SaaS provider manages resources for all of their tenants. Without good level of automation the SaaS application may became unmanageable as the customer base grow.

Tenant operations is essential for keeping a growing customer base under control. A poorly implemented tenant operation process limits the ability to scale effectively. SaaS providers are responsible for running tenants’ resources on their side and managing the tenant lifecycle. Therefore, operations and support teams should be able to monitor performance and access tenant-specific logs and traces within a multi-tenant environment. As the customer base grows, manual or ad hoc processes become unsustainable.

Billing and metering is also important when expanding to new markets or regions. For example, you may need region-specific pricing, taxation, or billing currencies. A modular billing system allows to localise the service offering and adapt pricing structures easily.

Once the SaaS product is built, adding more customers costs relatively little, which makes scaling faster and margins higher. This is why a well-designed application can unlock its full growth potential.