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Finding Success in the World of SaaS

26 August, 2021 - By Symon Thurlow

Secret to success – how three SaaS companies have achieved the dream

When you’re in the trenches of your software company, it’s easy to forget about the end goal. All that hard work comes with rewards: investment, sale, exit and financial freedom.

We’re lucky to walk alongside and support businesses on that same journey, so we have front-row seats to that dream outcome.

Here we talk about three clients who have succeeded, and how they got there.

Cin7 – handing over ops to focus on scaling

Cin7 started with a clever solution to an everyday problem. It streamlines millions of sales orders with a platform that reduces cost, effort and time, enabling product sellers to deliver to customers and build their brands without worrying about inventory and operations.

In a tidy coincidence, Parallo does for Cin7 what it does for its customers – managing its cloud operation so that the team can focus on investment, scaling and accelerated growth.

Today, Cin7 is a global powerhouse in the inventory management space. By working with Parallo, Cin7 has relentlessly focused on product development to improve DevOps capability and ship product faster.

“Starting from a no-name company to having about 150 staff now and thousands of customers around the world, you need a partner to help you scale technically, and Parallo has really helped us with it,” says Danny Ing, Founder and Chief Architect at Cin7.

Recently, Cin7 closed on its majority investment by Rubicon Technology Partners, launching its global growth strategy.

Merlot Aero – focussing on automation first

Merlot Aero provides ERP software to 33 airlines around the world. The solution optimises aircraft and crew utilisation and uses Microsoft Azure to add agility, speed and service to a market that needs an always-on approach. Maintaining those high levels of service delivery and availability – with Merlot Aero’s speed of growth – is harder than it looks.

“We were spending too much time dealing with platform issues,” says CEO Mark McCaughan. “We wanted to focus on delivering a great product to our customers, and not have to deal with all the infrastructure that the product sits on.”

Parallo removed its infrastructure problems and managed all service delivery aspects with an automation-first policy.

That effort paid off, with Merlot Aero selling to a Canadian company for NZ$36 million. For Mark, the speed they could achieve was all part of the package.

“In the SaaS market, faster is better. Our customers like the speed with which they can have new solutions and improvements,” says Mark. “Our speed to market is now part of our product pitch and our business positioning – and that’s gold.”

Healthscope – $570 million exit

Late last year, Australian private hospital owner Healthscope sold its New Zealand pathology business to the New Zealand Superannuation Fund for NZ$570 million.

A leading provider of healthcare services, Healthscope deals with critical data that needs protection and secure access. More than anything, its growth depended on unassailable security.

Healthscope had two data centres, one primary data centre and the second for backup and disaster recovery. It was ‘so far so good’, but the disparate data sources meant Healthscope was running two versions of backup software on ageing infrastructure. The resulting backup failures – and lack of accurate reporting – were holding it back.

With Parallo managing the day-to-day backup, Healthscope achieved 98% backup success rates and solved several data management function problems within three months.

“The improved internal reporting means our IT team can see exactly the status of our servers, and solve any issues as soon as possible. We have a really high level of confidence from the business,” says Paul Williams, Healthscope’s Chief Information Officer.