What Problem Does It Solve?
TL;DR
Selling to enterprise customers is challenging due to concerns about data leaving the enterprise, driven by regulatory requirements, heavy/siloed datasets, strict access control, and the need for operational resilience. Solving these challenges in-house requires costly engineering, maintenance, and support investments -- culminating in you being forced to build, maintain and support multiple products. Tensor9 eliminates this friction by enabling you to deliver your existing product directly into your customer’s environment, reducing costs and expanding access to sensitive/regulated enterprise markets. With Tensor9 you build, maintain, and support a single product, and deliver it to any enterprise customer.
First Problem: Enterprise Sales Friction
Software vendors often encounter significant sales friction when selling to enterprise customers due to concerns about data leaving the enterprise. This friction arises from four key factors:
Regulatory Compliance (including Data Sovereignty)
Enterprise customers in regulated industries (e.g., finance, healthcare, government) often require that sensitive data, such as PII or financial records, remain within their country’s borders or infrastructure. Vendors struggle to comply with regulations like GDPR, HIPAA, and national security requirements when their SaaS product requires centralizing customer data in the vendor's cloud.
Heavy/Siloed Data
Some enterprise customers work with heavy datasets that are too large to move efficiently to the cloud or must remain within highly secure systems (e.g., financial transactions, genomics, video surveillance). Moving these datasets introduces prohibitive costs and risks.
Privileged Access
Enterprise customers often have strict access controls around sensitive systems, requiring that software vendors operate with minimal privileges. Traditional SaaS often requires higher levels of trust and access than customers are comfortable granting.
Operational Resilience
Enterprise customers prioritize uptime and resilience to external outages, but traditional SaaS models create a single point of failure: the vendor’s cloud. If the vendor’s cloud experiences downtime, customers lose access to critical systems.
Second Problem: Cost and Complexity To Do It Yourself
Addressing the above concerns typically forces you to build, maintain, and support multiple products: one SaaS product and additional versions for different enterprise environments (e.g., on-prem, air-gapped). This creates increased costs across the following dimensions:
Heavy Upfront Engineering Costs
Building versions of a product that work across different customer environments requires significant engineering effort.
- Bring-Your-Own-Cloud (BYOC): Requires supporting multiple cloud providers, including installation, container/hardware provisioning, seamless access control, and managed services.
- Kubernetes: Requires containerizing the product and replacing managed services with open-source equivalents (e.g., S3 → MinIO) while adjusting deployment and operational processes to fit the Kubernetes form factor.
- On-Prem and Air-Gapped: Requires building manual deployment workflows and offline support mechanisms to account for the lack of continuous connectivity.
Heavy Ongoing Maintenance Costs
Once multiple versions of a product exist (e.g., SaaS, BYOC, air-gapped), you face significant ongoing costs to maintain and patch each version. This includes ensuring security updates for open-source services used in self-hosted or air-gapped environments.
Heavy Support Costs
Without observability and continuous deployment tools, you will likely resort to manual support processes for troubleshooting and updates in customer-controlled environments. Traditional on-prem and air-gapped solutions often lack observability and support tooling -- requiring cumbersome log transfers, longer debugging cycles, and higher mean-time-to-recovery.
Tensor9's Solutions
Tensor9 solves these problems by enabling you to deliver your existing SaaS product into your customer’s environment:
Reducing Sales Friction
Regulatory Compliance
Tensor9 enables you to deliver your software directly into the customer’s infrastructure (e.g., private clouds, on-prem systems, air-gapped networks), ensuring that data never leaves the customer’s environment. This makes compliance with regulations such as GDPR, HIPAA, and national data sovereignty laws seamless.
Heavy/Siloed Data
Tensor9 allows you to deliver software that processes data locally, within the customer’s environment, avoiding the need to transfer heavy/siloed datasets to your cloud. This minimizes data movement, respects data sovereignty, preserves performance, and avoids costly data egress fees.
Privileged Access
Tensor9 facilitates secure delivery by enabling vendors to observe and support their software within the customer’s infrastructure using audit-logged, customer-supervised access. This approach minimizes the need for high-trust permissions and mitigates concerns about unauthorized access or vendor overreach.
Operational Resilience
Tensor9 ensures that software instances are delivered independently into each customer’s environment, eliminating reliance on your cloud. This means that even if your environment experiences downtime, customers can continue to access their critical systems.
Reducing Costs/Complexity
Reducing Upfront Engineering Costs
Tensor9 automatically replaces cloud-managed services with open-source equivalents (e.g., S3 -> MinIO, ElastiCache -> Redis, DynamoDb -> ScyllaDB). This allows you to build your product once and deliver it across any environment without extensive re-engineering.
Reducing Ongoing Maintenance Costs
Tensor9 centralizes software updates, enabling you to manage a single codebase while Tensor9 handles compatibility across different customer environments. This minimizes the overhead associated with patching and maintaining multiple versions.
Reducing Support Costs
Tensor9 provides observability with audit-logged, customer-supervised access, allowing you to diagnose issues in real time without sacrificing data privacy. You can continue to use your existing CI/CD pipelines (e.g., CircleCI, GitHub Actions) to deliver updates continuously, even for air-gapped deployments (which are semi-continuous). You can also continue to use your existing observability/support tooling (e.g. CloudWatch, DataDog, New Relic, PagerDuty) to continuously observe and support your software.
Summary
Problem | Problem Type | Tensor9 Solution |
---|---|---|
Regulatory Compliance | Sales Friction | Delivers software directly into the customer’s infrastructure, ensuring that data never leaves their environment. |
Heavy/Siloed Data | Sales Friction | Enables local data processing within customer environments, avoiding the need for large data transfers. |
Privileged Access | Sales Friction | Supports audit-logged, supervised access, allowing vendors to observe and support their software securely. |
Operational Resilience | Sales Friction | Deploys software independently in customer environments, avoiding dependency on the your infrastructure. |
Heavy Upfront Engineering Costs | Cost/Complexity | Automatically replaces managed services with open-source equivalents, enabling you to have one product that can be delivered anywhere. |
Heavy Ongoing Maintenance Costs | Cost/Complexity | Centralizes updates and manages environment-specific compatibility, minimizing the need for multiple codebases. |
Heavy Support Costs | Cost/Complexity | Provides continuous observability, shorter debug cycles, and shorter mean-time-to-recovery. |
Updated 6 days ago