64 lines
3.5 KiB
Markdown
64 lines
3.5 KiB
Markdown
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layout: post
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title: Replicated - An Easier Path from SaaS to Enterprise
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{{ page.title }}
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================
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<p class="meta">19 Jun 2015 - San Francisco</p>
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Over the last year I've had a chance to learn a lot more about early stage
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funding and made angel investments in a handful of startups. So far I've
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restricted my involvement to companies with ideas in which I have significant
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domain knowledge. I also insist on founders with relentless product focus, a
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fierce desire to help their customers be more awesome, and excellent
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communication skills. I recently met just such a company, with just such
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founders, tackling a problem that has personally caused me much pain.
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The company is [Replicated](http://replicated.com), and founders Grant Miller
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and Marc Campbell are making it easier to roll out an on-prem Enterprise
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offering based on an existing cloud-based SaaS product.
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At GitHub, we burned through **a lot** of developer cycles building our own
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installer (several times), securing the installation environment, coding an
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automated licensing management system, integrating single sign-on services
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(LDAP, Active Directory, CAS, etc, etc), building out a searchable audit system,
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supporting customer-reviewable support bundles (logs and other diagnostic
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output), allowing numerous backup strategies, and countless other
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Enterprise-specific features that were killing our Enterprise deals. All of this
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on top of hiring and building out the necessary sales, support, and accounting
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teams to create a smooth Enterprise experience for our customers.
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Replicated provides common Enterprise functionality (much of what I mentioned
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above, and all of it eventually) that you can wrap around your SaaS product,
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resulting in a first-class on-prem product in a fraction of the time. Beyond
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just technology, Replicated will help you understand your Enterprise customers
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through documentation on best practices and insight into the requirements and
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reasons that large companies desire the features they do. Until you can
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empathise with your customer (which is very hard to do as a fast-moving SaaS
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startup), you'll never build the best product possible.
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Getting into the Enterprise market will always be hard. But by reducing the
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technology burden, Replicated plans to erase much of the pain so you can focus
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on the other human-centric tasks. Not only am I an investor in Replicated, I
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believe in their mission and their founders so much that I've joined as an
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advisor. I understand what the uphill slog of the SaaS to Enterprise climb feels
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like, and I'm going to do my best to ensure you don't have to suffer it as much
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as I did.
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I'm also pleased to announce that Travis CI is now shipping their Enterprise
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product using Replicated. To see what the installation process is like, [watch
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Grant install Travis CI
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Enterprise](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ViN-qkcovL0&feature=youtu.be) on a
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fresh server in about seven minutes. For a deeper dive, Travis CI has also
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published a blog post covering some of their process in [getting their
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Enterprise installer ready using
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Replicated](http://blog.travis-ci.com/2015-06-19-how-we-improved-travis-ci-installation/).
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In the coming weeks, you'll start to see other well-known startups launching (or
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re-launching) Enterprise versions of their SaaS software on top of Replicated.
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If you're looking to do the same, and want to save yourself a lot of heartache,
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email [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected]), and start
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focusing on what matters the most: your unique and kickass product.
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