How Pivoting to a SaaS Model Allowed 320 Production Releases in 6 Months

After starting as an on-premise data catalog solution, the Actian Data Intelligence Platform decided to switch to a fully SaaS solution. A year and a half later, more than three hundred production releases have been carried out over the last six months, an average of almost three per day. We explain here the reasons that pushed us to make this pivot, the organization put in place to execute it, as well as the added value for our customers.

The Strategic Pivot to a 100% SaaS Data Catalog

Faced with these potential obstacles to the development of our data catalog, we naturally decided at the end of 2019 to make the switch to a fully SaaS solution. A year and a half later, we have just completed more than three hundred production releases over the past six months, an average of almost three per day. Here’s how we did it.

First, we addressed the initial security issue. We integrated security into our cloud practices right from the start of the project, and have launched a security certification process in this regard (SOC2 and soon ISO27001).

Then, we extracted from our architecture the only brick that had to remain on-premises: the Actian Data Intelligence Platform scanner. From a technological point of view, we set up a multi-tenant SaaS architecture by splitting our historical monolith into several application bricks.

However, the biggest challenge did not lie in the technical aspects, but in the cultural and organizational aspects…

The Keys to our Success: Organization and Acculturation to the SaaS Model

We have built and consolidated our SaaS culture, mainly by orienting our recruitments towards experienced profiles in this field, and by organizing knowledge sharing efficiently.

To illustrate the cultural aspect, we distinguish, for example, finished developments from complete developments. A development is considered finished when it is integrated into the code base, without any known bugs, with a level of security and engineering that conforms to the level of requirements that we set for ourselves. A development is considered complete when it can be made available to our customers, so that the developed functionalities form a usable and coherent whole.

To support this distinction, we have implemented a feature toggle mechanism to manage the activation of fully developed features: a development is systematically put into production as soon as it is finished, and then activated for our customers once it is complete.

In terms of organization, we have set up Feature Teams: each team works on a given feature, on all its components. As soon as a feature is complete, it is delivered. Other features are delivered incomplete, deactivated, but finished.

The SaaS Model and Added Value for Our Customers

The first to benefit from the agility of the SaaS model are obviously the Actian Data Intelligence Platform’s customers. The functionalities are available more quickly, that is to say as soon as they are complete. Moreover, the deployment of a new functionality can be done at their convenience within two months after the feature toggle is made available. This allows for easy integration into the customer’s context, notably by integrating their user constraints. Finally, this ability to activate features allows us to demonstrate the features in advance, or even in some cases to activate them in beta testing for our customers.

All this is obviously combined with the traditional advantages of a SaaS solution: automatic and frequent updates of minor evolutions or corrections, access to the solution from any browser, the absence of infrastructure at our customers’ sites allowing rapid scalability, etc.

If the path to pivot from an on-premise model to a SaaS application has had many challenges, we are proud today to have met the challenge of implementing continuous deployment and to bring more and more added value to our customers.

About Actian Corporation

Actian empowers enterprises to confidently manage and govern data at scale. Actian data intelligence solutions help streamline complex data environments and accelerate the delivery of AI-ready data. Designed to be flexible, Actian solutions integrate seamlessly and perform reliably across on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments. Learn more about Actian, the data division of HCLSoftware, at actian.com.