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I want to convince you to have an on-premise offering

hivekit.io

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Re: I want to convince you to have an on-premise offering

#81

Post by Terretta »

tobyjsullivan wrote: post #54
steveBK123 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The industry used to be able to ship shrink wrapped software that a non-technical person could install on their home computer, without 24/7 instant messenger support to get working. I think B2B software should be able to create manageable installations for technically competent IT professionals.. If your install has that long of a manual task list, your cloud SaaS infra is probably junk too.

You’re thinking of a time when only “computer geeks” could install and run the software of their choice. When every office had fleets of IT admins to install the pre-approved applications people needed for their day-to-day. Back then, learning how to manage your own PC and install software was tantamount to earning an IT certificate. Doing so for a few years in high school would be enough to qualify you for a career…

> You’re thinking of a time when only “computer geeks” could install and run the software of their choice.

Perhaps not thinking of a "time when", perhaps thinking of an OS that required an IT certificate.

Because even early Macintosh System Software (classic Mac OS before OS X) was bewildering to Windows users, since any user could "drag" a program from a floppy disk onto their hard disk, leave it anywhere, and it worked.

Arguably, OS X introduced the Applications folder in 2001 partly to give people a place to drag things to and feel more comfortable that's where they could find their "Program Files" (but mostly so multi-user system users would get to add and re-use apps in a common clear place they "should" be).

But you still didn't need an IT admin.

Re: I want to convince you to have an on-premise offering

#82

Post by dehugger »

bob1029 wrote: post #15

We are selling SaaS/B2B and are looking to support both modes moving forward. Our (my) preference is heavily tilted towards cloud, but we've modeled things to minimize our pain for on-prem. Path A: Run a windows server VM and SQL Server somewhere in our customer's infrastructure. Our customer is 100% responsible for the health of these items and provides them as a service to us. Our customer has to notify us of any i…

Path C: Sell installable software with documentation (and training courses if you are big enough). You'll still get yearly revenue via license fees.

I don't know why this went out of fashion but it works just fine. Your customers clearly don't want you to manage the infrastructure, based on your comment. Sell them what they want.

If the issue is that your system is so complex that a reasonably trained admin cannot manage it, you should probably fix that.

Re: I want to convince you to have an on-premise offering

#83

Post by bob1029 »

dehugger wrote: post #82
bob1029 wrote: post #15

We are selling SaaS/B2B and are looking to support both modes moving forward. Our (my) preference is heavily tilted towards cloud, but we've modeled things to minimize our pain for on-prem. Path A: Run a windows server VM and SQL Server somewhere in our customer's infrastructure. Our customer is 100% responsible for the health of these items and provides them as a service to us. Our customer has to notify us of any i…

Path C: Sell installable software with documentation (and training courses if you are big enough). You'll still get yearly revenue via license fees. I don't know why this went out of fashion but it works just fine. Your customers clearly don't want you to manage the infrastructure, based on your comment. Sell them what they want. If the issue is that your system is so complex that a reasonably trained admin cannot ma…

If you want to go all the way into the rabbit hole: the entire purpose of our system is to provide interfaces into various lines of our customer's businesses.

What our customers want is a technology partner who can adapt to their changing business needs over time. A one time cdrom+pdf distribution unfortunately will not get the job done in this case.

Our customers are paying for a business outcome. Our software is just a fraction of that puzzle.

Re: I want to convince you to have an on-premise offering

#84

Post by sgarland »

freeone3000 wrote: post #19
michaelt wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's not exaggerate here, the software industry managed to deliver software for on-premise use for several decades.

They used things like standardized packaging mechanisms, matrix testing across supported profiles, dedicated staging environments, and sensible logging schemes. These are expensive and time-consuming! Product velocity is greatly increased when less time is spent on such engineering cruft.

> Product velocity is greatly increased when less time is spent on such engineering cruft.

This attitude is why I get paged. Perhaps we shouldn’t be encouraging lightning-fast growth above all else.

Re: I want to convince you to have an on-premise offering

#85

Post by ocdtrekkie »

If I have a choice between a company that sells SaaS and a company that offers an on-prem option, the latter gets my business.

If you aren't confident enough in your software to hand me that code in an install file, I guarantee I don't want to rely on your janky startup's hacked-together spaghetti.

Re: I want to convince you to have an on-premise offering

#86

Post by ocdtrekkie »

sgarland wrote: post #84
freeone3000 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They used things like standardized packaging mechanisms, matrix testing across supported profiles, dedicated staging environments, and sensible logging schemes. These are expensive and time-consuming! Product velocity is greatly increased when less time is spent on such engineering cruft.

> Product velocity is greatly increased when less time is spent on such engineering cruft. This attitude is why I get paged. Perhaps we shouldn’t be encouraging lightning-fast growth above all else.

This attitude is why the IT field is never going away. Businesses need adults and professionals ensuring reliable infrastructure, not "product velocity".

Re: I want to convince you to have an on-premise offering

#87

Post by happymellon »

Symbiote wrote: post #58
tobyjsullivan wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re thinking of a time when only “computer geeks” could install and run the software of their choice. When every office had fleets of IT admins to install the pre-approved applications people needed for their day-to-day. Back then, learning how to manage your own PC and install software was tantamount to earning an IT certificate. Doing so for a few years in high school would be enough to qualify you for a career…

"The industry" sold software in the 1980s that had use instructions like "Insert disk 1 and press the 'Reset' key to load". In the very early 1990s, something like "Insert disk 1 and click the disk icon, then click ". Installation to the hard disk was optional, and might be one or two steps. Later in the 1990s, installation was pressing "Next", "Next", "Next" after inserting the CD.

Yes, and now we have to deal with security theatre, whether it is corporate, or pushed on us by our OS.

Software has to handle much more hostile environments.

Re: I want to convince you to have an on-premise offering

#88

Post by dehugger »

bob1029 wrote: post #83
dehugger wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Path C: Sell installable software with documentation (and training courses if you are big enough). You'll still get yearly revenue via license fees. I don't know why this went out of fashion but it works just fine. Your customers clearly don't want you to manage the infrastructure, based on your comment. Sell them what they want. If the issue is that your system is so complex that a reasonably trained admin cannot ma…

If you want to go all the way into the rabbit hole: the entire purpose of our system is to provide interfaces into various lines of our customer's businesses. What our customers want is a technology partner who can adapt to their changing business needs over time. A one time cdrom+pdf distribution unfortunately will not get the job done in this case. Our customers are paying for a business outcome. Our software is ju…

That's a very obtuse take. Plenty of modern software follows this model; updates for locally installed software is hardly rocket science. I work with a vendor that provides shipping rate software which requires updates at least weekly. Still locally installed and licensed.

Re: I want to convince you to have an on-premise offering

#89

Post by chatmasta »

macrael wrote: post #5

"Third: Package it nicely. Ideally, your customer should be able to download a zip with an executable and some config files from a well designed enterprise page - or get a URL to a Docker Repo. When your on-premise version starts for the first time, it should set itself up as autonomously as possible: Check if it has the required access and permissions, connect to the database to set up tables, have sensible log outp…

Over 40% of the Web is deployed this way. Wordpress installation is basically "upload some files, complete installation GUI, and then get started."

There's no reason other products couldn't do this as well, even those with a complicated stack that requires provisioning cloud resources (or equivalently, SSH'ing into servers on the local network or calling private cloud API endpoints). If you can deploy a commit from a pipeline, then you can make a self-hosted bootstrappable installer for your users.

The installer could be a tiny shim running on the user's laptop that's responsible for bootstrapping the rest of the infrastructure and then deleting itself after redirecting the user to the cluster admin panel. The trick is to make it smooth, so even non-technical users can provision and eventually administer a secure, self-updating cluster as easily as they can keep their iPhone up to date. Walk them through the process of getting AWS credentials. Heck, scrape and script the login flows if that makes it smoother (it's their computer running the code so who cares?). Ask the user the minimal questions needed to fill the config. Once all that's in place, trigger your deployment scripts on the cluster, to pull images from a container registry or whatever. Wait for it to be up and running.

When the cluster's up, redirect them to its admin panel that's more sophisticated and controlled by you. Let them check for updates, install plugins, run common operations (like "restart," etc).

Then just don't ship broken code, make sure your scaling policies work (or at least that they work well enough to avoid phone calls from customers that don't make you any money). And boom you've got a nice product.

I'm not saying it's easy. But if you already have automated deployments (you do have automated deployments, right?), then it's not that many extra steps. Productizing it is hard but can be done.

Re: I want to convince you to have an on-premise offering

#90

Post by citrin_ru »

KRAKRISMOTT wrote: post #21
dijit wrote: post #16

There's a lot of really great SaaS products that get no traction in companies I've worked in. Largely because "control your workflow" (a-la the toyota method) requires that a vendor is unable to change things on your behalf without your knowledge. "On-prem" is about being permitted to invest your own resources into ensuring that your $thing will work during the hours it needs to work and you can pour as much or as li…

On prem is easy if you are willing to pay 100K a year. Once 6 figures come into play, any SaaS company would be willing to do on-prem. I find that those complaining about on-prem are mostly small business customers that are more trouble than they are worth. Serious B2B companies won't blink at those prices.

SaaS and on-prem software are very different in how they are developed and require different expertise. Even if you would pay a SaaS company enough so they will be willing to adapt their SaaS to on-prem it will be a mediocre product.
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