In this service model, we also often see SaaS companies leveraging their operational agility to drive greater customer loyalty. These SaaS providers will get into a mode where they release new capabilities, respond to feedback, and morph their systems at a rapid pace. Seeing this constant and rapid innovation gives customers confidence that they will be benefactors of this constant evolution. In fact, this is often the tool that allows emerging SaaS companies to take business away from traditional non-SaaS market leaders. While some massive, established market leaders may have a much deeper feature set, their inability to rapidly react to market and customer needs can steer customers to more nimble SaaS-based offerings.

So, while this product vs. service concept may seem like I’m being a bit pedantic, to me it’s an important distinction. It connects directly to this idea that SaaS is very much a mindset that shapes how entire SaaS organizations approach their jobs and their customers. In fact, many SaaS organizations will adopt a series of metrics that measure their ability to meet their service centric goals. It may be tempting to view this as something that can be bolted onto your service at some future date. However, many successful SaaS organizations rely on these metrics as a key pillar of their SaaS business.

The B2B and B2C SaaS Story

The value of SaaS has a natural B2C mapping. Many of the highly visible examples of SaaS show up in the B2C model. The problem here is that some builders and organizations will presume that SaaS somehow only fits in the B2C space. I’ve seen technology teams and service providers suggest that their business-to-business (B2B) products can’t or shouldn’t be delivered in a SaaS model purely based on the fact that they are B2B.

For this book, I’ll not be assuming anything about whether you’re B2C or B2B. The practices, strategies, and patterns here are assumed to apply equally to these domains. Yes, there are areas where I might suggest that a given practice might work slightly differently for B2B or B2C. To me, these are mostly exceptions. The reality is, the goal and mindset of these domains is mostly universal. There are just nuances that might influence how these models will address the needs of their customers.

It is important, however, to note that the architecture patterns that are used in some B2C offerings are required to address unique scaling and availability challenges. If you’re supporting millions of tenants and onboarding thousands of new tenants each day, the design and strategies you employ are going to be highly specialized. In fact, these B2C SaaS providers are often required to invent new breakthrough technologies that can address their massive scaling and operational challenges. While there’s lessons to be learned from these models, the exotic and inventive strategies that are used in these environments are often well outside the needs of the average SaaS builder. Our focus will be more on those B2C and B2B environments that are leveraging the scale and availability of existing cloud technologies to support the scaling and availability needs of their environment. Where it makes sense, I’ll highlight areas where you may need to explore more targeted scaling models to support loads that might exceed the natural scaling boundaries of existing tooling, service, and so on.