Glassbeam moved their SaaS application from hosted physical servers to virtual servers on OpSource Cloud to improve flexibility and lower costs. This allowed Glassbeam to dynamically scale resources up and down quickly instead of waiting weeks to commission new physical servers. Glassbeam now only pays for cloud resources when needed, reducing infrastructure costs dramatically while maintaining excellent support from OpSource.

1. Case Study
Glassbeam Moves SaaS
Application to the Cloud for
Improved Flexibility and
Lower Cost
Case Study Highlights “We are an applications software company. We don’t want to
be in the business of hardware procurement and resource
• Glassbeam provides a SaaS
solution for product analytics
management. Outsourcing that to a trusted partner, who is
that helps equipment managing that operational complexity, is a huge advantage
manufacturers understand for us. OpSource is helping us run our business.”
log data that their products
generate at customer sites. Puneet Pandit
President and CEO
This product intelligence
provides a complete picture of
Glassbeam Product Intelligence on Demand
customer status, configuration,
Glassbeam’s Product Analytics Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution
and usage – and is the key
provides manufacturers of storage, server, switch, medical equipment,
to lowering support costs,
and other devices with unprecedented value and information through
increasing services revenue, and
a specialized analytics approach on product operational data such as
improving customer satisfaction.
log files.
• Challenge: Improve flexibility
and lower cost of supporting The solution parses, builds a data warehouse, and analyzes streams
on-demand, high-performance of incoming operational data from the installed base on a near
computing (HPC) workloads. real-time basis. It visually displays a complete picture of customer status,
configuration, and usage in views designed for the needs of service,
• Solution: Migrate production
support, engineering, sales, R&D and marketing organizations. Building
SaaS application from hosted
an equivalent solution in house could cost upwards of one or two million
physical servers to virtual servers
dollars and take many months to deploy. In contrast, the Glassbeam
on the OpSource Cloud.
solution can be deployed within four to six weeks and for an eighth of
• Glassbeam chose to stay with the cost of building it in-house.
OpSource based on a close
working relationship and The solution is sold to product manufacturers on an annual subscription-
years of excellent managed based pricing structure through a SaaS model. Using Glassbeam, a
services support. manufacturer can:
• Provide proactive and predictive resolution to customer issues,
improving customer retention and lowering support delivery costs
© 2011 OpSource, Inc. All rights reserved.

2. GLASSBEAM MOVES SAAS APPLICATIOn TO THE CLOUD FOR IMPROVED FLExIBILITy AnD LOWER COST
• Create new monetized the reload process, this data had
professional services to advise to be reloaded in the background
customers on audit and without impacting performance.
optimization services
• Aggregate product behavior To make this process transparent
across the entire installed base to to users, Glassbeam created a
enhance product quality and get parallel staging environment in
market intelligence for sales and which the data could be reparsed
marketing purposes on servers commissioned from
OpSource. So CPU-intensive
Challenge: Reduce Costs, was this process that it would
Increase Flexibility require months to complete on
“We are an applications The Glassbeam SaaS solution four or five servers so Glassbeam
software company. We don’t runs on a combination of web, typically commissioned as many
want to be in the business of parsing, and database servers. The as 20 servers to complete the job
hardware procurement and company’s strength and focus lies within a few days. Commissioning
resource management. Out- in developing and continuously that many servers in a dedicated
sourcing to a trusted partner, improving its industry-leading Managed Hosting environment
OpSource, who is managing product analytics software. could take one week or more.
operational complexity is a Managing an IT infrastructure is Glassbeam needed a hosting
huge advantage for us.” not one of its core capabilities. solution that would provide
Several years ago Glassbeam greater flexibility at lower cost.
Puneet Pandit decided to outsource its IT needs to
President and CEO
a managed hosting provider. After Solution
an extensive evaluation, it chose In mid 2010, OpSource introduced
OpSource Managed Hosting and Glassbeam’s President and
Application Operations. CEO, Puneet Pandit, to the
OpSource Cloud. OpSource is
Glassbeam was very satisfied with the only enterprise-class cloud
the level of service and support Infrastructure-as-a-Service offering
that OpSource delivered over that includes hardware-based
the years, but the ISV felt that security and scalability, complete
running its application on physical customization and control, easy
servers didn’t offer the degree integration, 24x7 live support,
of flexibility needed to scale and 100-percent availability
resources up and down quickly. guaranteed. “There were other
Periodically, as often as every cloud hosting providers in the
three months, Glassbeam clients market, but we already had a
rolled out new software releases good relationship with OpSource
and firmware updates for their and they had the cloud so it was a
products. This typically changes natural fit for us to continue the
the data log format, which meant partnership,” says Pandit.”
that Glassbeam had to reload all
the data – one, two, or even five Glassbeam moved all of its SaaS
terabytes of it. Because clients infrastructure, its web, parsing,
were still using the solution during and database servers, from
© 2011 OpSource, Inc. All rights reserved.

3. GLASSBEAM MOVES SAAS APPLICATIOn TO THE CLOUD FOR IMPROVED FLExIBILITy AnD LOWER COST
OpSource’s Managed Hosting to Pandit sees one more advantage
the OpSource Cloud seamlessly in working with OpSource – the
and without incident. “The Cloud ability to easily migrate to a
works well,” says Pandit. “We still Hybrid Cloud. Glassbeam’s SaaS
get the support we need, but at application is database-intensive
a much lower infrastructure cost with a lot of I/O between the
with greater flexibility.” application and the user. To
ensure the highest level of
Impact: Lower TCO, Higher performance for the user,
Flexibility Glassbeam has the flexibility to
By moving to the Cloud, move to a Hybrid Cloud model
Glassbeam has substituted where web and parsing servers
physical servers for virtual would continue to reside on
servers. “A virtual server costs less the OpSource Cloud, while
than half that of an equivalent the database would be run on
physical server,” says Pandit. managed physical servers in
“Our infrastructure costs are OpSource’s Managed Hosting
dramatically lower today.” environment.
Within a Managed Hosting “We are an applications software
environment it could take weeks company,” says Pandit. “We
to commission new physical don’t want to be in the business
servers, depending upon of hardware procurement
manufacturer lead times. In a and resource management.
Cloud environment it takes only Outsourcing to a trusted partner,
minutes. “We can scale on the OpSource, who is managing
fly,” says Pandit. Furthermore, operational complexity is a huge
Glassbeam only has to pay for advantage for us.”
resources when they are needed
and only for as long as they
are needed.
© 2011 OpSource, Inc. All rights reserved.

4. GLASSBEAM MOVES SAAS APPLICATIOn TO THE CLOUD FOR IMPROVED FLExIBILITy AnD LOWER COST
About Glassbeam
Glassbeam Inc. is the leading provider of Product Analytic Solutions. Fortune 500 companies including
IBM and EMC utilize Glassbeam to translate “big data” into “critical operational and usage”
information. The Glassbeam software assembles information from thousands of machines installed in
these customers’ installed bases worldwide. Support, service, engineering, sales and marketing teams
leverage the intelligence presented by Glassbeam’s software to gain insight into actual product and
feature usage in the field, potential customer use problems, and increase the effectiveness of up-sell and
cross-sell programs. Glassbeam is delivered as a cloud based SaaS solution, and can be offered on-site
as a managed service. The company’s headquarters are located in Sunnyvale, CA, phone: 408-740-4600,
web: www.glassbeam.com.
About OpSource
Founded in 2002, OpSource provides cloud and managed hosting solutions that enable businesses to
accelerate growth and scale operations while controlling costs and reducing IT infrastructure support
risks. Headquartered in Santa Clara, with operations in California, Virginia, the UK, Ireland, and India,
more than 600 enterprises, service providers and Software-as-a-Service ISVs rely on OpSource’s expertise,
experience and cloud automation technology to operate high-availability, business-critical hosting
environments. OpSource is a Dimension Data company. www.opsource.net.
Corporate Headquarters
5201 Great America Parkway, Suite 120, Santa Clara, CA 95054, 1-800-664-9973 (USA)
+353 1 661 9979 (EMEA), sales@opsource.net, www.opsource.net
© 2011 OpSource, Inc. All rights reserved.