Traditionally, DataMiner was available only through a perpetual license model, requiring customers to manage their own support infrastructure, including servers and databases. However, factors like shorter life cycles and the need for greater business agility are pushing technical infrastructure to continuously adapt, challenging the traditional deployment model as well as the commercial model.
Problem 1: Infrastructure management has become more complex
Infrastructure management has become increasingly more complex due to several factors:
Frequent software updates and patches:
Updates and patches are now released much more frequently, often on a weekly or even daily basis. This continuous process ensures the infrastructure remains secure and compatible with other moving parts. The rapid discovery of vulnerabilities, such as zero-day vulnerabilities, requires increased agility to respond immediately and apply unscheduled patches to mitigate risks.
Time and budget constraints:
Customers spend significant time and budget designing, deploying, testing, and validating infrastructure. Additionally, time spent on infrastructure upgrades and updates impacts overall satisfaction.
Almost 1 in 4 incidents reported to our support team relate to self-managed supporting infrastructure, consuming both customer and Skyline’s time, impacting system availability and ultimately affecting customer satisfaction.
Over-dimensioning:
How much compute and storage capacity is truly needed? Customers often design their infrastructure to handle the worst-case scenario, accounting for peak loads and future capacity needs that may never materialize. This results in significant underutilization of resources and unnecessary expenditure.
Problem 2: Shifting buying trends and rapid technological advancements
Organizations’ purchasing trends have shifted over time due to:
Historical purchasing patterns:
In the past, organizations would purchase hardware and software, holding onto them for extended periods and treating them as capital expenditures with depreciation over several years. This made perpetual licenses a cost-effective option.
Rapid technological advancements and lower adoption barriers:
The speed at which new technologies emerge has accelerated, making older hardware and software to become obsolete more quickly. The adoption of cloud services and Software as a Service (SaaS) platforms has made it easier for organizations to be more agile, giving access to the latest technologies without the need for significant upfront investments.
To address these challenges, we’ve introduced a comprehensive SaaS offering: DataMiner as a Service (DaaS). This fully managed, cloud-hosted solution provides on-demand access to ready-to-use software.
Why SaaS?
Infrastructure management vs. SaaS delivery model
You build a Monitoring and Orchestration platform for the value it provides to your business, not for the infrastructure behind it. Yet, infrastructure still demands attention, ensuring security, availability, and cost-efficiency. You want to prevent system downtime caused by infrastructure issues or avoid expanding your network attack surface—all while keeping costs low.
Time is limited, and it should be spent on activities that directly contribute to your business, whether that’s transitioning to a data-driven operation, automating business or technical processes, or simplifying your operations. At Skyline, we want our customers to focus on building solutions that directly contribute to their business, rather than managing infrastructure.
With DaaS, we offer a “carefree” delivery model, where Skyline takes responsibility for maintaining the supporting infrastructure of the cloud-hosted solution. Even if your role is DataMiner System admin—Where is your time best spent? On regular server patching and infrastructure management, or building and maintaining solutions that directly impact your organization’s success? DaaS allows you to focus on what truly matters—delivering value to your business.
Technology and business trends vs. SaaS commercial models
Today’s rapidly evolving technological landscape unlocks new business models and services, which in turn fuel more technology changes. Businesses need agility to adapt to these new opportunities, but traditional perpetual licenses often lack the flexibility required for dynamic business transitions.
By adopting a usage-based model, we provide our customers with the agility they need. Usage is the key factor—we offer a model where customers pay based on their actual software usage. This reduces the total cost of ownership by minimizing risks associated with technology becoming obsolete due to changing business needs. It also helps avoid premature write-offs or underutilization of volume or capacity licenses, which is a common issue with perpetual licenses. With this model, customers can adjust their usage up or down as needed without the concern of long-term infrastructure investments.
On average, the effective DataMiner license utilization is below 70% of its capacity.
Our usage-based offering combines Pay-per-Use and subscriptions. Pay-per-Use provides maximum flexibility, allowing you to pay only for what you use, with a model that grows with you. Subscriptions offer predictable usage and a better rate in exchange for a committed level of usage over longer periods. This combination ensures that you can scale your usage according to your needs while benefiting from cost savings for consistent usage.
Ultimately, we have added usage-based options to our SaaS offering to give you the flexibility to continuously evolve at your own pace, without license constraints.
Conclusion
Our decision to include SaaS in our offering is a strategic move that aligns with the evolving needs of businesses. It offers agility, reduces risk, and allows organizations to focus on their core competencies. By adopting SaaS, we are not only simplifying infrastructure management for our customers but also enabling them to achieve greater success with our solutions.
Basically a no-brainer!