You’ve just finished up your SaaS rich client application, and now you’re ready to deploy it to your customers using Microsoft Remote Desktop or Citrix XenApp. Your work now is done, right?
Actually, it’s just beginning. One of the trickiest, yet most important decisions for SaaS over Remote Desktop vendors, is how to license their application. Do you license by named user? Sounds easy enough, until you realize that the same user may want to have multiple sessions running on your server accessing your application. And of course, each concurrent session they open means more computing resources used that you have to pay for.
OK, so maybe you should simply keep a tally of long they leave sessions open and run your application. That’s easy enough to do, right? Not exactly, unless you want to code that into your SaaS app. And what if they have multiple sessions going. Do you count that time twice?
Perhaps the most equitable way to handle things is to simply charge by the greatest number of concurrent users your clients have running at any given day of a month. In other words, the greatest peak load they place on your server or cloud resources in a given billing cycle. Well, that’s great, but how do you account for that? And how do you keep a detailed log of those records in case a client challenges you about how many simultaneous connections they had open to your app?
Finally, how can you keep tabs on how the growth of your client base is impacting the load on your servers? Wouldn’t it be nice to get a feel for how much bandwidth the average user consumes in their sessions? The average duration of their sessions? How the average number of sessions are trending by server on a week by week basis?
Remote Desktop Reporter – The Indispensable Solution For Every SaaS Over RDS Provider
SaaS vendors who deploy their subscription-based apps over Remote Desktop, as opposed to the Web, love Remote Desktop Reporter. And, typically they make it a standard part of their monitoring and reporting architecture moving forward. Why?
By installing Remote Desktop Reporter, and letting it do the heavy lifting in terms of monitoring client interactions with a SaaS application, SaaS vendors can outsource the tedious processes involved in policing license and resource use. For example:
- Peak concurrent users can be tracked by server or by user daily, weekly, or monthly, with scheduled reports automatically being sent to Accounts Receivable for billing purposes.
- Distinct, named users who access your application in any particular day, week, or month can similarly be metered.
- You can see, by client, the actual users who had sessions running on your servers in any hour of any day in a reporting period.
- You can track, by user, the total actual time consumed in all sessions, taking into account or not taking into account simultaneously running sessions.
- You can track, by user, the individual and total bandwidth consumed by their sessions.
The Bottom Line
Outsourcing your license and resource metering means getting to market faster, and more reliably increasing your bottom line by flagging client accounts who need to be upgraded to a higher licensing tier based on usage patterns and resource consumption.
Ready to get started? If you deliver your SaaS application over Remote Desktop or Citrix XenApp and would like to discuss your specific license and resource metering needs, reach out. Give us a call at 1-855-738-8457 (if you’re inside the US) or at 1-702-749-4325 (outside the US). We can make report suggestions, do an online demonstration, and generate a quote.
