Release Delivery helps SaaS companies meet the needs of their enterprise customers

Today, I’m excited to announce the general availability of Release Delivery, our latest addition to the Release environments as a service platform.

Working with numerous cloud-native SaaS providers we saw the common struggle: scaling the deployment options to meet the hosting demands of the enterprise customers. These companies would lead with a multi-tenant offering to optimize resource utilization, deliver faster and more predictable updates, and provide overall consistent performance. This approach would create great software, however, many enterprise customers would see the multi-tenant aspect as potentially commingled data, elevated IT risk profile, and longer approval/whitelisting processes. In the end, enterprises will opt for a safer, albeit not as good, single-tenant version from a competitor.

Building out a single-tenant version of a SaaS product is a significant investment, and it presents a tough choice for growing software vendors. Commit resources to build infrastructure instead of innovation, or miss out on the chance to crack large customer deals.

We spoke to many SaaS companies who face this conundrum. Do I proactively create the ability to deliver my SaaS application as a single-tenant/self-hosted instance? Or do I wait until a large customer asks for it and then scramble to build it? What if I build it and they decide not to buy it? Did I just waste valuable time building something no one will want?

Enter Release Delivery: the fast way for SaaS companies to deploy into a variety of environments required by many large organizations without having to build the functionality themselves.

How Release Delivery Works

Release Delivery templatizes your application deployment and allows you to “stamp out copies” custom-tuned to each unique customer environment, turning your SaaS product into an Enterprise-grade SaaS product.

With Release Delivery we set out to address the key pain points our customers were facing, and here is what we did:

Problem	Solution
Modifying your application to run in each disparate single-tenant environment often requires numerous choices and unknowns that make the task a chore	Release Delivery uses an application template that codifies the necessary design choices and patterns. We saw hundreds of customers design their applications to be reproduced at a click of a button, with a confidence that the decisions they made to adapt the application for a single-tenant/self-hosted deployment will work and be easy to manage in production
Installing single-tenant applications into customer cloud accounts is tedious and difficult	Release Delivery simplifies the installation process for your customers. Simply send your customer the installation URL and Release will walk them through every step to get your application running in their cloud account.
Managing and debugging numerous installations of a single-tenant application becomes untenable	For troubleshooting and performance monitoring, Release Delivery provides logging and console access to running applications in your customers' cloud accounts. And you can always add other APM tools such as DataDog to your deployed applications.
Performing timely updates on all single-tenant applications in customer cloud accounts is difficult and slow	Release Delivery provides a simple mechanism to deploy an upgraded version of your application to one or many deployed single-tenant/self-hosted applications at once. You can also share a "preview" version of your app with the customers before going live.
Handling unique customer security requirements for the single-tenant/self-hosted versions of your SaaS app is a challenge	Security is top of mind with Release Delivery. In addition to the product being highly secure, including the ability to "cut the cord" between Release and your deployments (air-gapped), Release provides in-depth documentation on all necessary security and privacy controls you can provide to your customers during your sales process.

We believe our core Release Environments as a Service product is the best solution for reproducing and maintaining complex applications. So the ability to deploy an application into a single-tenant or self-hosted environment is a natural extension of our core Release product line.

Unlocking new opportunities

Release Delivery comes to you after a year-long close collaboration with our select customers, who saw an opportunity to take their SaaS products to the next level. Thanks to their generous input and feedback, we navigated the peculiarities of the “on-cloud”/self-hosted versioning, unlocked access to enterprise requirements and helped them grow large account sales. With Release Delivery these SaaS providers now give their customers an amazing installation experience, wherever and however they want it. With only a few clicks their applications are deployed and running. Our customers can easily monitor and manage these deployments, and quickly upgrade the instances to keep their customers on the latest app version, without a heavy lift.

I am extremely excited about making Release Delivery available to all. If you’re a startup or a SaaS company that wants to generate more revenue from an “on-cloud”/self-hosted version of your application, talk to us! To learn more, join my webinar on April 20th, where I will show how Release Delivery works and share how it helps companies solve the problems around flexible deployment. Or, you book a meeting with our team to see a custom demo and get a trial account.

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About Release

Release is the simplest way to spin up even the most complicated environments. We specialize in taking your complicated application and data and making reproducible environments on-demand.