Do we have to rewrite everything?

Usually not. The valuable part of a mature system is the domain logic, and that is normally worth preserving. What changes is what surrounds it - tenancy, identity, the interface, deployment and billing. If a rewrite is the cheaper answer, we will say so.

What happens to our existing customers?

They move in cohorts, not all at once, and generally onto a platform that does more than the one they left. The migration plan is part of the project rather than an afterthought, because a technically perfect migration that upsets your customer base has failed.

Can both versions run side by side?

Yes, and for most migrations that is the sensible approach. The old installations keep working while the hosted platform proves itself, and customers move when they are ready rather than when the project plan says so.

How do we handle the change from licence to subscription?

Carefully, and usually with a transitional plan that credits existing maintenance. The commercial shape matters as much as the technical one, and we will work through both with you rather than only the second.

The software already works. The problem is that it only works for one customer at a time.

SaaS Migration in Colchester

Need saas migration in Colchester? Cube Systems implements and supports saas migration across Colchester, Chelmsford, Southend-on-Sea and Basildon and the wider Essex area.

Product development
Colchester, Essex
01234 672 617

Talk about your product All product development

Being comfortably within a morning’s drive of our Olney office, Colchester is somewhere we get to regularly. Discovery, training and go-live are all better done in the room, and at 70 miles that is entirely practical.

Plenty of good software is trapped. It was written for one business, or installed on a customer’s own server, or licensed as a perpetual copy that somebody has to visit to upgrade. It solves a real problem well - it just cannot be sold at scale, supported centrally or improved without a coordinated rollout. Migrating it to SaaS means separating what is the product from what was only ever one customer’s configuration, introducing tenancy and identity, moving the data, and replacing the licence with a subscription. Done properly it also means your existing customers move across without losing anything, which is usually the part that decides whether the project succeeds.

One version
Instead of one per customer installation
Cohorts
Customers migrated in stages, not overnight
Reversible
Every cutover has a tested rollback

What it involves

Inside saas migration

The parts of the job that decide whether a product can be sold at scale, rather than only delivered once.

Separate the product from the configuration
Years of customer-specific tweaks get untangled into a core product plus configuration, so one codebase can serve everybody without a branch per client.
Tenancy and identity introduced safely
Accounts, organisations, roles and isolation added to a system that never had them, with a migration path that does not require every customer to move on the same weekend.
Data moved without drama
Repeatable migration scripts, dry runs against real data, reconciliation reports and a cutover plan with a rollback - not a big-bang evening and a lot of hope.
Licences become subscriptions
Perpetual licences and annual maintenance turned into recurring plans, with a commercial transition your existing customers will actually accept.
Central deployment at last
One version, updated centrally, with no site visits and no customer stuck three releases behind because their upgrade window never came.
Visibility you never had
For the first time you can see who uses what, which features justify their maintenance cost, and which customers are quietly disengaging.

In practice

Where this usually starts

Anonymised, but not invented. These are the situations people describe to us before anything gets built.

A vendor with forty on-premise installations
The situation
A niche software vendor supported forty customer-hosted installations, each a slightly different version. Every bug fix had to be applied and tested forty times, and two customers were on releases so old they could not be upgraded in one step.
What changed
The product now runs as a single hosted platform with per-tenant configuration. Customers were migrated in cohorts over two quarters, support load fell sharply, and a fix now ships to everyone at once.
A desktop application losing to browser-based rivals
The situation
A mature Windows desktop product was still better than its competitors at the actual job, but was losing deals on the demo because prospects wanted something that worked on a laptop, a tablet and from home.
What changed
The domain logic was preserved and re-exposed behind a web application and an API. The desktop client remained available during the transition, and new customers now only ever see the browser version.
An internal system with an external market
The situation
An operator wanted to sell the system that ran their business, but it assumed one company, one set of reference data and one set of rules throughout, and their own data was interleaved with the application.
What changed
Tenancy, configurable reference data and rule sets were introduced, and the operator became simply the first tenant on their own platform. New customers can now be provisioned without touching the code.

Local coverage

SaaS migration across Essex

We cover Colchester and the surrounding area, including Town Centre, Greenstead, Lexden, Mile End and Old Heath, across the CO1, CO2, CO3 and CO4 postcode districts. We also work with businesses in Chelmsford, Southend-on-Sea, Basildon and Braintree and elsewhere in Essex.

Postcode districts

Areas we cover

Town Centre, Greenstead, Lexden, Mile End, Old Heath, Highwoods, Colchester Business Park and Severalls Business Park.

Getting to you

Roughly 70 miles from our office in Olney, Buckinghamshire. Discovery, training and go-live are done on site as standard - not because it looks good on a proposal, but because most of what a system needs to know is learned in the building.

SaaS migration elsewhere in Essex

All of Essex

How it happens

How a build actually runs

The same process wherever you are, and for Colchester the sessions that benefit from being in a room are held in one.

Shape
A few sessions working out what the product is, who pays for it and what the first version has to do. You leave with a written scope and a price, whether or not you go further.
Design
Screens, flows and the data model behind them, agreed before anybody writes production code. Changing a decision here costs an afternoon rather than a month.
Build
Two-week cycles with something working at the end of each one, in an environment you can log into. No six-month silence followed by a reveal.
Launch
Billing live, onboarding tested, monitoring in place, and the first real customers on the platform with somebody watching closely.
Run
Hosting, support and continued development for as long as you want it - or a clean handover to your own team, with everything documented.

You might call it something else

SaaS migration goes by a lot of names - if you searched for any of these, this is the page you wanted.

On-premise to SaaS migration
Cloud migration for software products
SaaS transformation
Software modernisation
Legacy application migration
Desktop to web migration

Questions

The things people ask first

Usually not. The valuable part of a mature system is the domain logic, and that is normally worth preserving. What changes is what surrounds it - tenancy, identity, the interface, deployment and billing. If a rewrite is the cheaper answer, we will say so.
They move in cohorts, not all at once, and generally onto a platform that does more than the one they left. The migration plan is part of the project rather than an afterthought, because a technically perfect migration that upsets your customer base has failed.
Yes, and for most migrations that is the sensible approach. The old installations keep working while the hosted platform proves itself, and customers move when they are ready rather than when the project plan says so.
Carefully, and usually with a transitional plan that credits existing maintenance. The commercial shape matters as much as the technical one, and we will work through both with you rather than only the second.