Sage saves 60 percent on compute costs while delivering software as a service with Azure Virtual Desktop

The journey from desktop applications to software as a service offerings

In 2015, Sage South Africa began offering its application (Sage 300 People, hosted by Citrix Payroll) through a software as a service (SaaS) model. Sage used a partner’s hosting platform and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) solutions to deliver the service to 470 companies and their roughly 500,000 employees. In 2018, Sage began looking for a  modern VDI solution that would scale easily and provides an improved end-user and management experience. “We were never able to optimize performance metrics in our previous environment,” says Kevin Thompson, Cloud Operations Manager Africa Middle East & Asia Pacific, Sage. “We also wanted to add disaster recovery and improve scalability across all our VDI components.”

Sage chose Microsoft Azure Virtual Desktop for its licensing structure, high availability, and disaster recovery capabilities. By late 2019, the company had migrated 300 People to Azure Virtual Desktop.

The new SaaS structure

With Azure Virtual Desktop remote app streaming, companies can deliver applications as SaaS offerings for users inside or outside the organization. Sage uses remote app streaming in Azure Virtual Desktop to link to a Sage Provisioning Portal server that provides a customer onboarding engine hosted on Azure. Sage South Africa also uses Azure Key Vault to help safeguard cryptographic keys and other secrets that cloud apps and services use. It employs Azure Active Directory and Azure Active Directory Domain Services to manage identities and provision users. Sage 300 People consumes the Azure Container Registry service and elastic pools in a SQL Server database, along with shared storage containers. IT staff develop and test everything using Azure DevOps and Azure Pipelines.

Sage South Africa set up Kubernetes clusters to present the Employee Self Service portal feature of 300 People in a containerized environment. It built an automation engine using Nerdio Manager for Azure Virtual Desktop, a solution to help automate, optimize, and secure Azure Virtual Desktop deployments, with FSLogix for profile roaming and Nerdio workload management and scaling tool to assist with activation and the management of Azure Virtual Desktop sessions.

IT management and automation

The more uniform and consistent the environment, the easier it is for IT staff to maintain peak performance and security. Sage South Africa IT staff image devices using Nerdio Manager for Azure Virtual Desktop and deploy them into host pools. If they need to configure a new image, they back up a standard image and deploy it into a host pool while they make updates, avoiding downtime (previously, the company created each customer image from scratch). Sage South Africa also uses Nerdio to activate and dynamically manage Azure Virtual Desktop sessions. ”We can clear virtual machines [VMs] automatically each time a user leaves an Azure Virtual Desktop session, which is great for security. Furthermore, we can be 100 percent certain no one’s leaving behind personally identifiable information on any virtual machine profiles. We can easily keep our virtual machine settings current and our virtual environment consistent,” says Thompson. “The solution maintains just the right active number of running virtual machines throughout the day.”

Kevin Thompson, Cloud Operations Manager, Africa Middle East & Asia Pacific, points out the benefits of this approach: “We can give each company its own application group for easier management. We have network security groups where we can manage all the ports that we need to open and close. The penetration test on our new environment looked very good compared with the previous environment, which revealed critical findings that we rectified before product launch.”

Managing and updating images now takes far less time. “Before, it took three days to manually update all the virtual machines at 25 minutes per VM,” says Van Der Westhuizen. “But in the Azure Virtual Desktop environment, everything is pipeline-driven and automated. We update and deploy the master image in less than an hour.” Thompson agrees, saying, “We couldn’t use templates or images before. Now, 90 percent of our Azure pipelines are fully automated. The reliability of pushing updates and code through multiple environments with automated infrastructure as code, deployment templates, and DevOps pipelines has made us very flexible, lessening our time to production.”

In the past, manually onboarding a new customer took four to seven hours. “We had to create security groups within application groups and assign users manually,” says Van Der Westhuizen. “Now, with automation and standard images, our Provisioning Portal does all that for each business partner as they onboard their users, saving an average of five hours per deployment. We then get an email saying it’s been done.”

Scalability and cost savings

Sage can now go to market faster and scale more efficiently. Thompson points to the flexibility and cost benefits of being able to create and retire resources and designate storage on the fly. “Before, we had this monolithic hosting environment with all the servers on all the time to cater to the workload,” he says. “With Azure Virtual Desktop and Nerdio, it’s easy to scale, and we only pay for the VMs that are on.” Because many employees who use 300 People do so for less than an hour a month, the savings average approximately $20,000 a month. “Azure Virtual Desktop costs us 60.5 percent less than our previous environment on VM usage alone,” adds Thompson.

Sage migrated its original customer base from the old environment in early 2020, and by October 2021, the company had acquired two-thirds more customers with the SaaS version of 300 People. ”Using Azure Virtual Desktop, we have modernized our business with the ability to offer competitive pricing and flexible, reliable service that has grown our business by 155 percent,” says Thompson. 

A good relationship with Microsoft and a strategic future in the cloud

Sage South Africa met with Microsoft experts each week for help building the Azure Virtual Desktop proof of concept. “Having this close working relationship with Microsoft, and getting help on very specific technical questions, really helped us get our product to market a lot quicker and with a lot more confidence,” says Thompson.

After the success of the 300 People SaaS offering, other internal groups at Sage are showing interest. “Four teams are considering or are already using Virtual Desktop, including Sage UK, which uses it for its Partner Cloud offering,” says Thompson. “Other teams want to use Virtual Desktop as a wrapper service to extend the life of our desktop products while we build SaaS or cloud-native products—the ultimate destination for all our products.”

Sage is also considering using multiple workspaces with Azure Virtual Desktop to extend the life of current desktop products. “Assigning different user groups and applications to their own workspaces will be a great help in the future,” says Van Der Westhuizen. “If we want to add accounting or enterprise resource planning to 300 People, we can present multiple app groups to the same customer.”

Sage South Africa uses the solution’s benefits to shift from administrative functions to a more DevOps role. “Since automating the IT tasks around SaaS delivery within Azure Virtual Desktop, we’re now able to concentrate more on other areas of our products, like bringing more of them into the cloud,” says Thompson. “We’re looking at how to improve delivery, add serverless technology, and increase monitoring and analytics.”

Find out more about Sage on YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.