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This is already pretty common in some regulated fields. Hospitals cannot run regular SaaS software for many things and therefore they self-host it with support

This is already pretty common in some regulated fields. Hospitals cannot run regular SaaS software for many things and therefore they self-host it with support from the vendor. I think this will become more and more relevant in other fields, too. Enterprises will want to keep control of their data, especially IP-related things. This will lead to various challenges, at least in my opinion: * You don't have full control of your SaaS software stack anymore. You need to make it work for many systems. Want to use serverless? Well, not possible. * Your pricing scheme will change. You don't much room for optimization anymore. For regular SaaS you can choose whatever works out for you. If the customer provides the infra than you have to work with that. * You need more people to suppport the heterogeneous infrastructure. I know companies who have a couple of devops people who are mostly about managing their SaaS solution on hospital servers. The hospital gives them access to parts of their systems, the manage the SaaS there when needed. This does not scale the same as traditional SaaS.

arul_jegadish 4y ago
(Full disclosure: co-founder of OpsVerse here) Great assessment of the use cases around Private SaaS. About your concerns of operationalizing this in a scalable manner: * Using Kubernetes as the base infra and developing your infra on top of that ensures a standard operating environment * Availability of advanced observability and remote management tools makes it possible to manage the Private SaaS infra just like managing traditional SaaS infra. About pricing schemes: Yes, but with Private SaaS, the cost of infra is taken care of by the customer. Hence, it could offset the increase in management costs. >> Enterprises will want to keep control of their data, especially IP-related things. Yes, especially for DevOps and DataOps tools, Private SaaS enables Enterprises to have full control over data residency and data governance.
- Shinmon 4y ago
  Thanks for answering. Not much of an expert in Kubernetes and co, but never looks really easy either. A shift to private SaaS essentially means it becomes much harder to get an MVP running. You don't want to setup kubernetes for an MVP. With a public SaaS you just do whatever you know. Doesn't have to scale at the beginning. In pricing you just lose some flexibility. On the other hand, you can remove the somewhat non-predictable costs for cloud services from the equation when calculating your unit economics. I wonder how this will affect VC funding tho, because potential revenues will be lower in this case as well. So, technically, the total addressable market becomes smaller as well.
  - arul_jegadish 4y ago
    Great points again! >> On K8s complexity This is improving. When we see customers without a K8s setup, we have automation in place to get that bootstrapped quickly. Overall, this will only get better in the future. >> harder to get an MVP running True. The way we handle is by having trials and MVPs done on the SaaS plan. I anticipate vendors to actually offer the traditional SaaS version as well. At OpsVerse, we see customers running trials on SaaS and then switching to Private SaaS when they subscribe. >> total addressable market Actually, for DevOps tools, the self hosted market is bigger than the SaaS market (Worldwide DevOps Software Tools Forecast, 2021–2025 - https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=US48052021 https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=US48052021) That is a target market. Plus the a good portion of the companies now using traditional SaaS too are good candidates!

arul_jegadish 4y ago

(Full disclosure: co-founder of OpsVerse here) Great assessment of the use cases around Private SaaS. About your concerns of operationalizing this in a scalable manner: * Using Kubernetes as the base infra and developing your infra on top of that ensures a standard operating environment * Availability of advanced observability and remote management tools makes it possible to manage the Private SaaS infra just like managing traditional SaaS infra. About pricing schemes: Yes, but with Private SaaS, the cost of infra is taken care of by the customer. Hence, it could offset the increase in management costs. >> Enterprises will want to keep control of their data, especially IP-related things. Yes, especially for DevOps and DataOps tools, Private SaaS enables Enterprises to have full control over data residency and data governance.

Shinmon 4y ago
Thanks for answering. Not much of an expert in Kubernetes and co, but never looks really easy either. A shift to private SaaS essentially means it becomes much harder to get an MVP running. You don't want to setup kubernetes for an MVP. With a public SaaS you just do whatever you know. Doesn't have to scale at the beginning. In pricing you just lose some flexibility. On the other hand, you can remove the somewhat non-predictable costs for cloud services from the equation when calculating your unit economics. I wonder how this will affect VC funding tho, because potential revenues will be lower in this case as well. So, technically, the total addressable market becomes smaller as well.
- arul_jegadish 4y ago
  Great points again! >> On K8s complexity This is improving. When we see customers without a K8s setup, we have automation in place to get that bootstrapped quickly. Overall, this will only get better in the future. >> harder to get an MVP running True. The way we handle is by having trials and MVPs done on the SaaS plan. I anticipate vendors to actually offer the traditional SaaS version as well. At OpsVerse, we see customers running trials on SaaS and then switching to Private SaaS when they subscribe. >> total addressable market Actually, for DevOps tools, the self hosted market is bigger than the SaaS market (Worldwide DevOps Software Tools Forecast, 2021–2025 - https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=US48052021 https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=US48052021) That is a target market. Plus the a good portion of the companies now using traditional SaaS too are good candidates!