A Case Study of an International Accounting SaaS Platform
How to Create a Unified Service Management Platform and Automate Service Delivery
About the Client
A European provider of cloud-based accounting services for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). Operating in Central and Eastern European markets, the company positions itself as a secure and straightforward alternative to an in-house accountant.
Initial State Before the Project
In its early days, the client made a strategic decision to maximize customer data isolation and security by deploying each client on a separate virtual machine (VM), leased from a third-party hosting provider. Initially, this model was justified by the small customer base and allowed the company to deliver services quickly.
By the time the infrastructure modernization project began, the company's setup had evolved into a complex and fragmented landscape. It consisted of a fleet of 800+ VMs hosted across several providers in different jurisdictions. Because the virtual machines had been provisioned at different times from different vendors, their configurations varied, complicating standardization efforts.
To manage this VM fleet, the company relied on a set of custom-built scripts. These scripts only automated basic operations — initial VM setup, application stack deployment, and bulk application of critical security updates.
Any changes to the hosting providers' APIs or to the structure of their own application required lengthy and costly script modifications. For any tasks beyond the scripts' scope, engineers still had to manage each VPS individually.
Challenges
The chosen model of isolated VPSs created a set of interconnected problems that began to directly threaten the company's core business processes:
Project Goals and Objectives
The client initiated a strategic project to transform its IT landscape and the business processes involved in user service delivery. The following high-level goals and specific objectives were defined.
Project Goals:
- Increase operational efficiency by automating the entire service lifecycle — from customer order to billing and technical support.
- Eliminate risks associated with service downtime.
- Build a scalable and flexible platform to support business growth and enable rapid launch of new services.
Specific Objectives:
- Consolidate Infrastructure — migrate all customer environments from fragmented VPSs across multiple third-party providers to leased dedicated hardware housed in a reliable data center.
- Standardize and Accelerate Processes — automate the deployment and provisioning of virtual environments, reducing new customer onboarding time from 24 hours to 30 minutes.
- Implement an Enterprise-Grade Virtualization Platform — deploy a highly available solution for virtual machine management.
- Integrate Billing and Service Management — implement a system that automatically links service ordering, activation, and provisioning with resource consumption tracking and payment collection, eliminating the need for manual operator intervention.
- Lay the Technological Foundation for future implementation of self-service capabilities, allowing customers to manage their purchased services independently.
Solution Requirements
To achieve its goals, the company adopted a strategy of building a proprietary cloud platform based on the integrated VMmanager and BILLmanager products from ISPsystem. This combined solution enabled the creation of a unified, automated ecosystem for managing both IT infrastructure and business processes.
The key deciding factors for this choice were:
Enterprise-Ready Maturity
The client had exhausted the limits of supporting in-house scripts. They required a robust, well-documented, and stable platform backed by professional technical support.
Ease of Use and a Low Learning Curve
The platform had to be intuitive for system administrators, allowing them to manage the entire infrastructure through a single web interface without a steep learning curve or extensive training.
Cost-Effectiveness and Transparent Licensing
The solution needed to have a predictable Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) with no hidden fees or the risk of sudden licensing changes.
A Unified Ecosystem
A core requirement was seamless integration between the virtualization and billing systems to achieve a high degree of automation.
Scalability and Flexibility
The solution had to scale effortlessly with the business, both horizontally (adding capacity) and functionally (adding new features).
Project Implementation
The project kicked off with meticulous planning, with a primary focus on ensuring a seamless migration for the existing customer base. The first step was deploying VMmanager on the new hardware platform. Concurrently, the client's IT specialists developed and tested a "golden image" of the virtual machine containing the entire required software stack, establishing the foundation for future service standardization.
The customer migration process from the old VPSs to the new platform was organized in several stages. A full backup was created for each client before their data was transferred to the new environment. The migration was executed in waves: a pilot group of non-critical clients was moved first to validate the process, followed by the gradual migration of live customer data in small, manageable batches.
Within VMmanager, isolated virtual networks, backup policies, and a monitoring system were configured. Simultaneously, in BILLmanager, the team set up service plans, integrated payment gateways, and configured automated notifications. The integration of the two platforms enabled the full automation of the service lifecycle — from the moment an order is placed on the website to the automatic provisioning of a virtual machine and daily billing.
The platform's launch into production was overseen with continuous monitoring and backed by enhanced technical support from ISPsystem specialists. The phased transition of all customers was completed in approximately two months, during which the system demonstrated stable performance even under peak loads. Significant emphasis was placed on documentation and technical staff training to ensure administrators could leverage the new platform's full capabilities effectively.
Key Features of the Implemented Solutions
Automated Service Provisioning
VMmanager automates the delivery of virtual resources in both IaaS and SaaS formats, providing users with a ready-to-use, isolated IT infrastructure that is abstracted from the underlying physical hardware. Customers receive a virtual environment that is fully isolated from other users and primed for immediate application deployment.
Platform and Cluster-Level High Availability
Thanks to its Unbreakable Clusters technology, VMmanager guarantees a high level of fault tolerance. If a node fails, the platform automatically migrates VMs to healthy servers within seconds, ensuring compliance with strict production uptime requirements. In practice, this has allowed the company to guarantee the continuous operation of its business-critical applications.
Streamlined VM Deployment
A library of virtual machine templates automates VM preparation. These templates contain pre-configured parameters (OS, network settings, services). When a virtual machine is created from a template, these settings are applied automatically, eliminating manual intervention. Templates can also include scripts for automated application installation and configuration, which minimizes manual effort and significantly accelerates deployment.
High Scalability
VMmanager's architecture is built for high scalability from the ground up. A single platform installation is designed to handle 56,000+ virtual machines, 50+ clusters, and 350+ physical servers. The platform can be scaled even further by adding more installations. This performance headroom provides a foundation for years of IT infrastructure growth without the need for a technology stack overhaul, giving the client confidence that their IT landscape will keep pace with business demands for the next 5-7 years.
Pre-Built Integrations for Service Delivery
With its ready-made integration modules, BILLmanager enables the automated sale of any hosting service — from shared hosting and VPS/VDS to virtual data centers, IaaS, dedicated servers, and colocation.
Sales Automation
BILLmanager's built-in tools automate the ordering and management process for any physical or virtual resources, as well as digital services.
Automated User Service Provisioning
The platform accelerates service delivery through automatic or semi-automatic provisioning workflows. Customers receive their service just minutes after placing an order, while staff can redirect their efforts to more complex tasks.
Versatile Billing Engine
The platform allows for flexible service provisioning and charging models, including usage-based billing (pay-as-you-go), allocated resource pools, and hybrid billing schemes. It also automates the generation and delivery of contracts, invoices, service acts, and receipts to customers. Clients can pay for services using more than 30 different payment methods.
Marketing and Sales Growth Tools
BILLmanager provides out-of-the-box tools for product promotion, user acquisition, and increasing customer loyalty — including client segmentation, promotional campaign management, email marketing, and promotional banners. The client actively utilizes the referral link mechanism. This tool automates new customer acquisition and partner rewards. Setting up a referral program is a matter of a few steps: simply define the reward amount, payout terms, and the eligible audience.
Results and Future Plans
The implementation of the integrated solution from ISPsystem enabled the client not only to resolve its initial operational challenges but also to build a robust foundation for future business growth. Following the full transition to the new platform, the company achieved impressive results:
Dramatic Improvement in Operational Efficiency
- New customer onboarding time slashed to just 30 minutes.
- Administrative overhead for customer environments reduced by 65%.
- 80% of technical specialists' time was freed up from routine maintenance, allowing them to focus on service innovation and development.
Significant Cost Reduction
- Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for the infrastructure was cut by 65%.
- Operational expenses for third-party provider services were substantially reduced.
Significant Cost Reduction
- Gained the ability to manage service plans with flexibility.
- Enabled the company to react instantly to market shifts.
- Empowered the rapid launch of new digital services.