SaaS Maintenance, Support, and Continuous Innovation

Changing the Tires on a Speeding Car

At Lionbridge, we know that maintaining, upgrading, and supporting Software-as-a-Service applications requires an entirely different set of techniques and workflows than traditional on-premise software. Significant upgrades are expected 3 or 4 or more times a year, and patches may occur weekly—with zero downtime. As one developer put it, "It's like changing the tires on a car driving 70 miles an hour."

The operational and financial issues can become overwhelming for ISVs—and according to the experts, most SaaS deployments fail not because of technical or marketing issues, but because of unanticipated maintenance costs.
 
Enter Lionbridge: one of the world's Top 100 Outsourcing Companies (as listed by the International Association of Outsourcing Professionals), and named by Microsoft as its "2008 Vendor of the Year" for application development, testing, and globalization. Although we are a U.S. public company (Nasdaq:LIOX) based in Massachusetts, we maintain low-overhead delivery centers in India, Poland, and China, along with some 40 offices in 25 nations.

Lionbridge knows SaaS and we know how to control its cost. In fact, last year our own "Freeway" language services product won the International "Stevie" Award for best new product or service. Freeway is a highly successful SaaS service with 700+ company tenants and tens of thousands of daily users. We have just launched a new, even larger-scale commercial version of Freeway called Translation Workspace.

We understand the challenge of slipstream upgrades and fixes in on-demand environments; the requirement for nonstop testing and re-testing using advanced automation and staging techniques; the challenge of an instant feedback loop from users; and the SaaS user configurability issues and backwards data compatibility questions that impact upgrades. We work on these issues every day for our cloud computing clients, who benefit from our continuous R&D on SaaS maintenance and SaaS development processes.

In fact, we have developed our own Continuous Integration Framework to monitor the health of SaaS deployments and enable us to release market-ready features into the environment in quick iterations with high confidence.

Here on the SaaS racetrack, we know that nonstop innovation is not an option, but a requirement. That's why we provide:

• Distributed offshore (Mumbai) and onshore (Boise) teams for SaaS release management, code maintenance, feature upgrades, and forward modeling. We have over 4300 employees worldwide.
  • Parallel Agile Teams often work on multiple code streams/branches for upgrades, fixes, & tuning.
  • SaaS Application Design using market-leading tools like CAST, Lattix LDM, Structure101, and Visual Paradigm.
  • Platform & infrastructure planning.
  • Specialist teams for .NET and Java architectures.  
  • Rapid technical assessments of new SaaS technologies, techniques, and deployment issues.
  • Rapid-Release Change & Requirements Management using leading tools like Rational Clearcase, Rational RequisitePro, Perforce, Subversion, and CVS.
   
• SaaS Helpdesk support in multiple languages, with feedback integrated into the maintenance review cycle.
  • Famously responsive, SLA-based Lionbridge customer service.
  • Transparent program management using leading collaboration tools for instantaneous cooperation between, your engineers, on-site, on-shore, and offshore resources—all coordinated with your hosting provider.
  • Dynamic Resource Models to balance teams, control costs, and meet peak demand cycles.
  • ISO-IEC 27001 certified security management.
  • Rigorous SaaS SLAs. 
   
• Continuous testing. Our VeriTest service was ranked the world's #1 testing service provider two years in a row by the Black Book of Outsourcing from the Brown/Wilson Group.
  • Parallel staging/testing servers available remotely to SaaS clients.
  • Advanced SaaS test automation tools & techniques.
  • Manual, Integration, System, Regression, & Performance Testing of SaaS prototypes.
  • Largescale Crowdsourcing for SaaS user experience reviews.  
  • Shared defect tracking.
  • We work with Rational ClearQuest, JIRA, Bugzilla, PushToTest, Rational Functional Test, Selenium, Silk Performer, JMeter, and other market-leading tools.
   
• Continuous SaaS localization available using Lionbridge Logoport technologies.
• SaaS eLearning solutions for your customers available through Lionbridge content and educational development specialists.

Ask for a no-cost assessment of your SaaS maintenance needs, and let us propose a painless transition to truly effective SaaS outsourcing.

Contact us today:  

• Call our Product Engineering Sales Hotline:
  +1 877.342.5334 or +1 503.305.8732
• Complete a Request Information Form  
• More options on our Contacts Page