Believe it or not, there’s a nice sized portion of SaaS vendors in the marketplace that are delivering their SaaS applications to clients over RDS (Remote Desktop Services) as opposed to the Web.
Why Remote Desktop and RemoteApp?
There are several reasons many software vendors choose remote desktop (or RDS) and RemoteApp as the mechanism by which to provide their software as a service over the Internet. Here are the big reasons:
- Inherent limitations in building a web application with a consistent, rich, and responsive user interface.
- Additional development and QA costs associated with web apps.
- The costs to migrate an existing non-Internet based application.
- Security considerations.
But Don’t Forget License and Resource Metering
As we do more and more business with “Saas over Remote Desktop” vendors, one of the biggest problems we see them experience is license and resource metering.
It’s one thing to develop and bring a SaaS application to market. It’s quite another to figure out how to:
- Capacity plan for additional hardware / virtualized servers in your server farm as your client base grows.
- Attribute costs of business to specific clients (How much bandwidth/memory do they use?).
- Reliably meter client usage of your application for billing purposes . . . and to know when to bump your clients up to the next subscription level based on that usage.
. . . or the Bottom Line
We then help SaaS vendors solve those very problems. As an aggregator of Remote Desktop Session metrics, our Remote Desktop Reporter solution is being used to produce lots of different reports that help a SaaS vendor stay on top of client license and resource usage, and in turn, significantly improve their bottom line.
Some of those metrics include:
- RDP bandwidth by user.
- Peak concurrent sessions by server and/or by user.
- Distinct RDS users by time period.
- Total time by RDS user.
- Specific application use by user.
Are You a SaaS Vendor in a Similar Situation?
We can provide a web demonstration of how to configure our software and establish these reports. Reach out to us here or message us on Twitter @RDPSoft.
Or, post a question below and continue the discussion!
