Paving the path to Kentico Xperience SaaS

SaaS (Software as a Service) as an alternative deployment model for Kentico Xperience? An idea desired by many organizations, whose digital transformation has been accelerated by the global pandemic, and supported by industry-leading analysts, marking SaaS as a critical capability for any DXP. Sounds appealing? What if we told you that it is not a matter of ‘if’ anymore, but rather ‘how’ and ‘when’? Here’s a sneak peek into what’s on the table!

It’s been a while since we first started toying with the thought of introducing another deployment method for Kentico Xperience. With our main goal in mind—helping our partners and customers grow, evolve, and tell their stories to more people faster—it became clear to us that a secure, compliant, easy-to-use solution for Kentico Xperience web hosting should be one of the next steps in the evolution of Kentico Xperience. And since the first time we touched on this topic publicly in the Fall of 2020, we’ve been working on making it a reality!
 

Cloud hosting as the path of the future

In general, cloud offers faster performance, responsiveness, and greater agility, without having to operate a server infrastructure. At the same time, a usage-based subscription service model provides greater flexibility when it comes to scaling business. Cloud also enables employees to access the platform from multiple devices such as laptops, smartphones, and desktop computers to deliver customized content based on customer buying behavior, preferences, and historical transactions.

This innovative and future-proof approach resonates very well with many of our partners and customers. To many of our partners, having an alternative deployment model in addition to on-premise (private datacenter) deployment, public cloud deployment, and container-based deployment, offers them the opportunity to focus on digital marketing and design services instead; handing the responsibility of cloud hosting over to Kentico Xperience.
 

The key benefits of Kentico Xperience SaaS

This new offering won’t interfere with Kentico Xperience 13, which has recently welcomed its second Refresh of four planned for 2021 and is to remain as a vital product going forwards. The Kentico Xperience SaaS offering presents an alternative deployment option. As we announced in the product vision earlier this year, we’re planning to release the next generation of Kentico Xperience (codename Odyssey), whose architecture corresponds perfectly with the SaaS model as well as supports our efforts in switching from a legacy perpetual business model to subscription-based licensing.
 
Let’s dive deeper into what the main pillars of this offering are all about:

• Single-tenancy solution – The software will be running in an independent instance for each customer, which is highly beneficial for achieving increased security, a heightened level of data privacy compliance (e.g., GDPR), and controlled scalability. Each client will have their dedicated server environment, no shared resources. It means that you can deploy to any Azure region, all backed by the highest security standards. Furthermore, this offers the option to choose the location of the primary and secondary data residency locations for every customer, keeping data safe with regional or even multi-geographical failover.
   
• Fast setup and easy deployments between cloud environments – Our goal is to provide SaaS options that, in terms of deployment capability, will suit everyone—regardless of their level of digital maturity. The Kentico Xperience SaaS offering will enable users to easily transition between deployment environments (DEV, UAT, PROD) and deploy their own custom code hassle-free. As such, every customer can enjoy rapid and seamless onboarding without relying on cloud-deployment experts.
   
• 24/7/365 global support for all active licenses – With our SaaS solution, all partners and end clients can request and receive support to achieve their goals, regardless of the time of day, night or geolocation. This advantage keeps things running smoothly and efficiently even for lesser cloud-experiences customers and partners and gives them the confidence that the hosting service is being operated in accordance to industry standards and ensuring the continuous operational status of their live websites.
   

Great transparency and flexibility

There’s one more thing that is driving our SaaS development efforts. We want to bring you a digital experience platform (DXP) that’ll keep growing with you, providing you with services that are designed to match your needs at any given stage of your journey. Our cloud hosting services will therefore be perfectly aligned with the size and digital experience maturity of our end clients to ensure they get the greatest value for their investment. And so will be the pricing model.

Kentico Xperience SaaS will be sold in three main price tiers, each covering specific types of services. We appreciate that all customers have varying needs that can change over time. Therefore, on top of each tier, optional value-added services can be purchased—such as multiregional failover, additional environments, specialized security measures, and much more—all tailored to meet the specific needs and compliance requirements of your business.

The immense advantage of this tier-based pricing model is that you’ll know exactly what is included in the offering and what the additional services and product capabilities are—all for a stable price. You simply won’t need to worry about fluctuating monthly prices based on web traffic or other services. To add to the convenience, our SaaS offering will not limit the number of users as the pricing model is not user-based.
 

Timeline and future vision

As we look ahead to the launch of this exciting new service, it’s clear that the future of Kentico Xperience SaaS will have lots to offer. Besides, thanks to more clarity that this model offers to Kentico Xperience as the host, we’ll be able to gain even more precise insight into the user needs and the actual usage of the product, which will allow us to continue refining our features and services over time.

We’ve set ourselves a timeline and the roadmap is shaping up, with more details to be revealed as we go. For now, the following milestones are ahead of us:

• October 2021 – Milestone 3 Beta – for Kentico Xperience partners to evaluate.
• February 2022 – Milestone 4  – All new DevNet running on Xperience by Kentico (our next-generation DXP Kentico Xperience, codename Odyssey) in SaaS deployment mode. Early Access Program opens for partners and customers with compatible requirements. 
• April 2022 – Milestone 5 – Full production grade SaaS. 
• July 2022 – General availability of Xperience by Kentico with SaaS.

Let the journey begin

Doubtlessly, our SaaS journey will be an exciting one. This future-proof approach, adding another dimension to the next generation of Kentico Xperience, is coming soon to offer a full range of new benefits that will help our clients achieve better business results.

Would you like to participate in the Beta program? Excellent! Let us know about it at product@xperience.io! Just curious to find out more and gain a clearer idea of what’s awaiting us in the future? Check out our product roadmap or talk to our experts to get all your questions answered!