Key Takeaways from Mastering the Marketplace: Developing your offer with the SaaS Accelerator

The recent Mastering the Marketplace webinar on Developing your offer with the Saas Accelerator is a session for ISVs who need help with the technical configuration when creating the SaaS offer on the Microsoft commercial marketplace. The session covers the SaaS Accelerator, installation, a tour of the accelerator, web apps, UI components, back end components, repository, and best practices.

 

Here's a summary of key takeaways from the event. If you want to access the full content, I encourage you to register and watch the recording.

 

• A SaaS offer has four essential pieces: the landing page, the admin portal, the SaaS product, and the buyer/buyer relationship. The landing page and webbook are very important as they are necessary to publish the offer, but an admin portal is essential to kick start the customer subscription and manage the subscription. The purchase process involves three sections: the buyer, the commercial marketplace, and the publisher's ecosystem.
• The SaaS Accelerator is a community-supported reference implementation for helping ISVs build their marketplace or SaaS offers, and it is an open-source software that saves time and effort by providing a baseline implementation.
• The SaaS Accelerator is a tool that can be used to reduce the workload of different personas by reducing the effort required to build and maintain the technical requirements, such as admins, developers, architects, testing team, operations team, security team, and business team.
• The presentation covers the process of creating a SaaS offer and how the SaaS Accelerator helps by installing it in one line partial command and completing the technical configuration page.
• The presenter demonstrates how to install an accelerator using the command "clone project" and "azure tenant" to install the accelerator. The presenter then explores the customer portal interface and the admin portal, showing how customers get to the landing page and the admin portal.
• The accelerator code base contains two web applications, the subscriber portal and the publisher portal, which give the landing page and the admin page for partners to manage their customer subscriptions. The admin portal has additional security where power users can add power users and the database is shared by both apps to share information.
• The SaaS Accelerator is a cloud-based application that runs scheduled jobs and emits meters at specific times and frequencies, and the three application projects mostly talk to the Services project, which in turn calls the Data Access project, which talks to the database and makes changes as utilized by the other projects.
• The presentation covers best practices for extending and customizing the Azure platform, including using the Azure keyword to store secrets, enabling Application Insights, using TLS, using ASC app service environment, using A/C where needed, and being prepared for disaster recovery.
• The SaaS Accelerator is a platform for scaling and resiliency, and it is important to consider moving up the App Service plan to get more CPU and memory, failover regions to maintain the application, and creating backups and testing them.
• The session covered the elements of the SaaS offer, the requirements, the advantage of using the accelerator, how to install the accelerator, and explored the SaaS accelerator environment both from the UI perspective, apps, and the architect perspective.