“A…profound implication of SaaS…is how it makes current use cases more efficient for existing enterprise customers on one hand, and accessible for completely new customers on the other.”
-Ben Thompson
Today we are proud to announce Tellius On-Demand – a SaaS offering with usage-based pricing. What does this mean to customers? Lower cost, lower commitment, elastic scalability, and no waiting on IT – all which mean faster insights. To learn more about why we created a Guided Insights on-demand option, check out our founder’s blog post, “Launching Guided Insights On-Demand to Shatter the Accessibility Barrier.” In this post, I’ll dive into the Tellius On-Demand offering and explain what a Tellius Credit is, how easy it is to get started, and how we automatically handle growth.
In This Post
Why On-Demand Is King
At its very nature, a true SaaS subscription model benefits both large enterprises and small-to-medium sized businesses. As Ben Thompson points out in his Stratechery article from April 2019, large enterprises have variable needs – SaaS subscriptions allow these companies to pay for exactly what they need, when they need it. This same on-demand subscription model opens up the doors for smaller businesses that traditionally were excluded due to the large up-front investment required for a suite of analytical tools capable of processing large amounts of data. Removing the barrier of entry opens up possibilities for any organization.
Getting started with Tellius On-Demand is an easy, fully self-service experience. Every new user is entitled to a 14-day free trial, which they can access by clicking “Start for Free” on the Tellius homepage. From the Free Trial page, users fill out a short form and click Get Started. After naming their instance URL and validating their email address, a dedicated instance of Tellius is spun up in minutes.
The 14-day free trial allows access to all of the Tellius Enterprise features, from connecting to a myriad of data sources, loading data (if desired), to Guided Search using natural language, Auto-Insights for automated data analysis, creating Vizpads, and Machine Learning Modeling. Tellius On-Demand is built upon transparency, and we make it easy to track your consumption of Tellius Credits.
What is a Tellius Credit?
Tellius Credits are how we calculate usage of system resources. Tellius is powered by computing resources – CPU cores and Random Access Memory (RAM). Each Tellius Credit is equivalent to using 4-Core 32GB RAM machine (one server unit) for one hour.
Consumption of Tellius Credits are usage-based, meaning that you will only be charged for the compute resources that you use for the time that you use them. System resources are typically driven by three things: number of users, amount of data, and number of Insights/ML jobs. The benefit of Tellius auto-scaling and usage-based pricing is that you no longer have to deploy a system to handle worst-case scenarios of maximum load, only to have all that capacity sit idle most of the time. With Tellius On-Demand, you only pay for the resources you use, and we automatically make additional resources available when you need them.
The image below highlights how usage based pricing can compare to traditional analytics pricing, where you are paying for capacity that you may only be using for a fraction of the time.
How Does Auto-Scaling Work?
While usage or consumption-based pricing is great for all business sizes, many customers want the ability to control how much they are spending. Tellius has an integrated system health monitor where you can track your current resource usage and set an auto-scaling policy.
Auto-scaling takes advantage of the Tellius elastic architecture by allowing customers to choose how aggressive the system automatically grows and shrinks. While many usage-based systems require users to manage their growth in a manual way, Tellius will scale horizontally and vertically based upon the Auto-Scaling Mode that the user selects. In addition, users set the maximum number of Tellius Credits to be consumed per hour, so customers have a way to contain costs in a granular way.
Pay Only For What You Use – Really!
Not only is the activation and scaling of Tellius On-Demand completely self-service – the billing is totally self-service as well. Oftentimes BI companies will require that you talk to a sales representative who will push for an annual commitment (or longer!). How can someone on a tight budget get started with an Insights tool when they are asked to commit hundreds of thousands a year? Tellius is truly a consumption-based product with no upfront term commitment where we only charge your credit card at month-end based on actual usage!
We are truly proud of the frictionless, self-service Guided Insights platform that we’re making available to anybody today at a fraction of the cost of traditional BI and visualization tools.
Sign up now and get started with uncovering insights from your business data.
