Glassbeam moved its SaaS application to the cloud to enhance flexibility and reduce costs associated with IT infrastructure. By partnering with Opsource, they achieved significant operational efficiency and scalability, allowing them to adjust resources quickly and manage costs effectively. This transition also enabled Glassbeam to offer its clients improved services and support while maintaining high performance without the burden of hardware procurement.

1. case study
Glassbeam Moves SaaS Application to the Cloud
for Improved Flexibility and Lower Cost
industry: Glassbeam Product Intelligence Challenge: Reduce Costs,
Technology on Demand Increase Flexibility
Glassbeam’s Product Analytics Software- The Glassbeam SaaS solution runs
country:
as-a-Service (SaaS) solution provides on a combination of web, parsing,
United States manufacturers of storage, server, switch, and database servers. The company’s
business challenge: medical equipment, and other devices strength and focus lies in developing and
with unprecedented value and information continuously improving its industry-leading
Improve flexibility and lower
through a specialised analytics approach on product analytics software. Managing
cost of supporting on-demand,
product operational data such as log files. an IT infrastructure is not one of its core
high-performance computing
The solution builds a data warehouse, and capabilities. Several years ago Glassbeam
(HPC) workloads
analyses streams of incoming operational decided to outsource its IT needs to
solution: data from the installed base on a near real- a managed hosting provider. After an
time basis. It visually displays a complete extensive evaluation, it chose
Outsource hardware procurement
picture of customer status, configuration, OpSource Managed Hosting and
and resource management to a
and usage in views designed for the needs Application Operations.
reputable cloud provider
of service, support, engineering, sales, R&D Glassbeam was very satisfied with the
services: and marketing organisations. Building an level of service and support that OpSource
Migrate production SaaS equivalent solution in-house could cost delivered over the years, but the ISV felt
application from hosted physical upwards of one or two million dollars and that running its application on physical
servers to virtual servers on the take many months to deploy. In contrast, servers didn’t offer the degree of flexibility
OpSource Cloud the Glassbeam solution can be deployed needed to scale resources up and down
within four to six weeks and for an eighth quickly. Periodically, as often as every
results: of the cost of building it in-house. three months, Glassbeam clients rolled
• Internal efficiencies that The solution is sold to product out new software releases and firmware
allow ClearBenefits’ small team manufacturers on an annual updates for their products. This typically
to become more productive subscription-based pricing structure changes the data log format, which meant
and proactive through a SaaS model. Using Glassbeam, that Glassbeam had to reload all the data
• Flexibility to accommodate a manufacturer can: – one, two, or even five terabytes of it.
requests, technical and operational Because clients were still using the solution
• Provide proactive and predictive during the reload process, this data had
expertise, and professional resolution to customer issues, improving
deployment of services for to be reloaded in the background without
customer retention and lowering support impacting performance.
new requests delivery costs
• Ability to manage to seasonal • Create new monetised professional
peak performance services to advise customers on audit and
optimisation services
• Aggregate product behaviour across the
entire installed base to enhance product
quality and get market intelligence for
sales and marketing purposes

2. case study | Glassbeam
“We are an applications software company. We don’t want to be in
the business of hardware procurement and resource management.
Outsourcing that to a trusted partner, who is managing that
operational complexity, is a huge advantage for us. OpSource
is helping us run our business.”
Puneet Pandit, President and CEO
To make this process transparent to users, Impact: Lower TCO,
Glassbeam created a parallel staging
Higher Flexibility
environment in which the data could be
reparsed on servers commissioned from By moving to the Cloud, Glassbeam
OpSource. So CPU-intensive was this has substituted physical servers for
process that it would require months virtual servers.
to complete on four or five servers so “A virtual server costs less than half that of
Glassbeam typically commissioned as many an equivalent physical server,” says Pandit.
as 20 servers to complete the job within “Our infrastructure costs are dramatically
a few days. Commissioning that many lower today.”
servers in a dedicated Managed Hosting
Within a Managed Hosting environment
environment could take one week or
it could take weeks to commission
more. Glassbeam needed a hosting
new physical servers, depending upon
solution that would provide greater
manufacturer lead times. In a Cloud
flexibility at lower cost.
environment it takes only minutes.
“We can scale on the fly,” says Pandit.
Solution
Furthermore, Glassbeam only has to pay
In mid 2010, OpSource (a Dimension
for resources when they are needed and
Data company) introduced Glassbeam’s
only for as long as they are needed. Pandit
President and CEO, Puneet Pandit, to
sees one more advantage in working with
the OpSource Cloud. OpSource is the
OpSource – the ability to easily migrate to a
only enterprise-class cloud Infrastructure-
Hybrid Cloud. Glassbeam’s SaaS application
as-a-Service offering that includes
is database-intensive with a lot of I/O
hardware-based security and scalability,
between the application and the user. To
complete customisation and control, easy
ensure the highest level of performance
integration, 24x7 live support, and 100%
for the user, Glassbeam has the flexibility
availability guaranteed.
to move to a Hybrid Cloud model where
“There were other cloud hosting providers web and parsing servers would continue
in the market, but we already had a good to reside on the OpSource Cloud, while
relationship with OpSource and they had the database would be run on managed
the cloud, so it was a natural fit for us to physical servers in OpSource’s Managed
continue the partnership,” says Pandit. Hosting environment.
Glassbeam moved its entire SaaS “We are an applications software
infrastructure, its web, parsing, and company,” says Pandit. “We don’t
database servers, from OpSource’s want to be in the business of hardware
Managed Hosting to the OpSource Cloud procurement and resource management.
seamlessly and without incident. Outsourcing to a trusted partner,
“The Cloud works well,” says Pandit. OpSource, who is managing operational
“We still get the support we need, but complexity, is a huge advantage for us.”
at a much lower infrastructure cost with
greater flexibility.”
CS / DDMS-0844 / 12/11 © Copyright Dimension Data 2011 For further information visit: www.dimensiondata.com/solutions