SaaS Provider Option
Enables SaaS providers to more rapidly on-board new customers, reduce operational costs, speed time-to-market, leverage SSL in a scalable manner and gain deep customer insights.
The torrid growth of the SaaS market combined with the sky-high expectations of SaaS customers has introduced significant new business and technical challenges
The SaaS market has experienced tremendous growth during the past several years, which has accelerated the transition of on-premise hosted applications to applications that are hosted in the Cloud and accessed over the Internet. The torrid growth of the SaaS market combined with the sky-high expectations of SaaS customers has introduced significant new business and technical challenges that SaaS Providers must address in order to maintain a competitive advantage.
Akamai's Web Performance Solutions enable SaaS Providers to deliver all their SaaS Applications to any user (e.g. - customers, partners, and suppliers), on any device, anywhere in the world by overcoming the inherent challenges related to Internet performance, reliability, and security.
Additionally, Akamai has built a set of SaaS Provider-specific capabilities, called the SaaS Provider Option, which can be added to Akamai’s Enterprise Web Performance Solutions. Akamai's SaaS Provider Option enables SaaS Providers to leverage the tremendous performance and reliability capabilities of Akamai’s Web Performance Solutions in way that is specifically designed for the unique business and architectural requirements of SaaS Providers.
Akamai's SaaS Provider Option enables Faster Provisioning, Granular Reporting, and Aligned Billing.
Faster Provisioning
SaaS Providers can now more rapidly and easily onboard new customers using open APIs. These open APIs also enable SaaS Providers to leverage SSL in a scalable manner across their customer base. This helps SaaS Providers decrease the amount of time to monetize new customers, reduce operational costs, and increase time-to-market.
- SaaS Dynamic Origin – via the Luna Control Center, SaaS providers can easily configure a single rule or pattern that allows Akamai to discover the primary SaaS provider origin data center for Akamai to route all SaaS users for the given SaaS app of that given SaaS customer.
- SaaS Dynamic Origin Diagram
Click here to view the detailed diagram - Secure Domain Provisioning API – via programmatic API, SaaS providers can create a new SSL certificate or associate an existing SSL certificate with the secure vanity domain for that SaaS customer, in an automated fashion, across their customer base. This API will also automatically provision the Akamai edge hostname associated with the certificate.
- Secure Domain Activation API – via programmatic API, SaaS providers can associate a secure vanity domain with a pre-existing Akamai config, in an automated fashion, across their customer base.
- IP & Geo Blocking API – via Programmatic API, SaaS providers can easily configure IP and/or Geo blocking settings for each of their SaaS customers, in an automated fashion, across their customer base.
- SaaS Registration API – via programmatic API, SaaS providers can easily convey to Akamai the valid IDs and readable names for the AppID & CustomerID which will be used in Akamai's SaaS Reporting.
- Granular Reporting – SaaS Providers can now gain deep reporting visibility and insights into each of their SaaS customers' experience. Reports are updated automatically as new customers are provisioned. This allows SaaS Providers to troubleshoot any potential performance or reliability issues, and provide customer-specific value confirmation to their customers.
SaaS Dynamic Origin
Challenge: Many SaaS Providers have multiple data centers
Many SaaS Providers provision each of their SaaS customers to one of their data centers
It is a complex and manual process for SaaS providers to specify which data center each SaaS customers users should be routed to
Solution: Akamai SaaS Dynamic Origin
Step 1
End user enters their vanity SaaS App URL into their browser Eg: SaaSApp.customer.com or SaaSApp.Customer2.com
Step 2
Akamai parses the hostname by CNAME chain, path, Query String or Cookie
Step 3
Akamai identifies the specifc SaaS customer
Step 4
Akamai converts the vanity SaaS App URL into the real SaaS provider’s URL for that customer Eg: SaaSApp.Customer.com converted to Origin-Customer.SaaSProvider.net
Step 5
Akamai then makes the user request to the appropriate data center where that customer’s instance is provisioned
Benefits
SaaS Providers can now more rapidlly onboard new customers, thus decreasing operational costs and increasing time-to-value for new customers
SaaS Dynamic Report Generation
Challenge: Today, Akamai reporting is only at the SaaS App level
Solution: Akamai SaaS Reporting
Step 1
End user enters their vanity SaaS App URL into their browser Eg: SaaSApp.Customer.com or SaaSApp.Customer2.com
Step 2
Akamai parses the hostname by CNAME chain, path, Query String or Cookie
Step 3
Akamai identifies the specifc SaaS customerrts
Step 4
Akamai’s Luna Control Center dynamically recognizes new customer SaaS App, then begins generating customer-specific versions of all Akamai SaaS Reports
Benefit
SaaS Providers can now gain deep reporting visibilty and insights into each of their SaaS customer’s experience.
Reports are updated automatically as new customers are provisioned
Aligned Billing
SaaS Providers can now take advantage of a first-of-its-kind user-based billing model for Akamai services.
SaaS Providers can now take advantage of a first-of-its-kind user-based billing model for Akamai services. The user-based billing model is an optional unit of measure, which enables SaaS Providers to align their consumption of Akamai's Web Performance Solutions with their user-based business model.
The introduction of the SaaS Provider Option brings together Akamai’s globally distributed Intelligent Platform with a comprehensive, integrated collection of performance, reliability, and management capabilities designed to meet the unique demands of delivering SaaS Applications today and tomorrow.
