Our simple cheat sheet of metrics can help you pinpoint ways to improve the profitability of your SaaS business.

To be successful in scaling up your SaaS business you either need to secure investment or be able to make a lot of money on your own. Measuring your profitability may seem simple, but when you’re only looking at the bottom line you’re not necessarily going to be able to see how you can improve it. Increasing profitability means breaking down the areas of your business such as:

• acquisition – your sales and marketing
• service delivery – your operations and running costs
• retention – the cost of keeping existing users

Then you need to look for approaches that will help you to reduce costs, increase efficiency or increase revenue. In our download, each of these areas and approaches comes with a metric that you can use to monitor and analyse performance.

We’ve talked recently about how switching to IaaS or bare metal cloud can reduce SaaS costs and increase customer lifetime value (CLV), but that’s not the only way to increase your profits. Each of our metrics also comes with ideas on how you can work to improve it. Automating sales and marketing communications can increase the efficiency of your acquisition spending. Adding premium features can increase your revenue from existing customers. In fact, even changing the maximum size of any team within your organisation can increase productivity.

Of course, being profitable isn’t always enough in and of itself, but it can help you secure the funding you need to take your plans forward. Proving your current or future potential for profitability is important for investors, but you’ll also need to focus on gaining users, making the most of your data, or innovating to stay ahead of the competition.

Still, making money is a good start, so download our guide to SaaS profitability now.

The term IaaS is used almost exclusively to describe virtualised solutions, like AWS and Azure, but since cloud infrastructure is, in reality, tin, bare metal cloud should be included in the scope of the term.

What is IaaS?

Infrastructure as a service describes the provision of processing, storage and networking (and potentially) other basic computing resources, over a network and in an on-demand fashion.

IaaS customers are given access to servers which can be dedicated or, more often, virtual and free to install the OS and applications of their choice. The customer doesn’t host or manage the underlying infrastructure but is able to use the resources as they wish.

As with all ‘as a Service’ computing models, customers benefit from access to the resources they need without having to invest in expensive hardware upfront, instead they pay monthly and only for what they use.

What is bare metal cloud?

Bare metal cloud is an environment in which physical, dedicated servers can be provisioned to customers with cloud-like ease and speed. Bare metal cloud customers are given access to the entire processing power of individual servers, as well as any storage, networking or other services they require.

Within a bare metal infrastructure there is no multi-tenanting (sharing of machines) and the servers provisioned are not virtual ones created on top of any hypervisor.

Customers of bare metal cloud are free to use their dedicated servers in any way they want, including running any OS and applications as well as installing hypervisors to create their own virtual machines if they want.

And bare metal cloud is provided as a service, with monthly payments and on-demand flexibility.

Ready to deploy on bare metal? Create your free account and start configuring your bare metal servers here.

So, bare metal cloud is IaaS?

This depends on your view point.

Many define IaaS as the provision of virtual resources only. Some include dedicated servers in their definition. In our view, bare metal cloud is the true IaaS whereas virtualised versions are really a form of Platform as a Service (PaaS).

In all scenarios you gain access to a server on which you can install and run you chosen OS and applications. In this sense, IaaS and bare metal cloud are the same.

On a virtual IaaS however, you have no knowledge of or control over the actual infrastructure on which your services are built. The provider has control of these and your services are abstracted from them.

With bare metal cloud on the other hand, you are provisioned full dedicated servers, with no virtualisation or sharing. It’s up you how you use these and, in the case of installing a hypervisor, how many virtual machines you run on each.

With bare metal you get control of the full stack, from the tin right up to the user interface, and can optimise utilisation and performance to a granular level, something you simple cannot do in a virtualised environment.