SaaS Strategy
Is SaaS dead, or changing shape? These episodes cover the future of SaaS in the agentic era: deployment models, pricing, go-to-market and how AI changes what a SaaS company sells.
All 20 Agentic SaaS Talks episodes about SaaS Strategy.
SaaS Strategy episodes
Episode 39: Enterprise Adoption of AI: When AI Starts Writing to the System of Record
Guest host Michael Cooper, founder of AGLedger.ai, joins Bill Tarr and Kamal Gupta to argue that the line that matters for enterprise AI is action, not adoption. He walks the adoption curve from chat and coding copilots through workflow automation, supervised action and bounded autonomy to probabilistic decisioning. The group covers agent identity, why an agent that resets its memory should be treated as a new employee on every run, and why results drift between a Monday and a Saturday. Cooper says enterprises already have four of the five pieces they need and are missing a durable, tamper-evident record of intent, approval and action, and why a log an agent reconstructs afterward is not evidence. Anyone building or buying agents that write to systems of record gets a concrete case for recording intent first.
Episode 35: The Founder's Guide to Scaling Open Source AI Products to Production on AWS
Omnistrate co-founders Kamal Gupta and Alok Nikhil map the road from open source adoption to revenue: the four ingredients of monetization (project, enterprise features, distribution, go-to-market) and the three business models open to open source AI companies, product-led growth, AWS Marketplace co-sell, and enterprise sales. Alok closes with a live demo that turns vLLM into a managed inference service with a self-service customer portal, showing why distribution needs a control plane and why a Marketplace listing alone gets you discovered but not paid.
Episode 34: Agentic AI Governance in Production: Inside DataRobot's Agent Workforce Platform
Romi Datta, VP and Head of Product Management at DataRobot, explains why enterprise AI is moving past chatbots and copilots toward full agent workforces, and why 95% of agentic AI pilots still fail to deliver measurable ROI. He walks through production use cases from insurance claims processing to industrial safety at Chevron (with NVIDIA edge AI), then breaks down the governance, observability, secure context management, and agent memory an enterprise platform needs to run agents in cloud, hybrid, on-prem, and air-gapped environments.
Episode 29: BYOC or Bust: Why Enterprise Customers Want You in Their Cloud
BYOC has shifted from a deployment option to a buying requirement. AWS solutions architects and Omnistrate's Kamal Gupta break down why enterprises now demand software in their own cloud, the security building blocks that make it work, and how agentic AI and data gravity are accelerating the move toward Bring Your Own Cloud.
Episode 28: Commercializing Open Source: Why Most Founders Get It Wrong
Recorded at the AWS re:Invent SaaS Summit, four open-source veterans from Percona, Couchbase, and Omnistrate break down what actually works when commercializing open source, and the expensive mistakes founders make. The panel covers open core vs. foundation models, avoiding MongoDB-style license backlash, and partnering with hyperscalers without getting 'Amazon'd'.
Episode 27: LLM Tokenomics: New Economics Making 'Cheap' Engineers Expensive
From token leaderboards and LLM FinOps to the rise of the 'Agent Shepherd', the panel unpacks what LLM Tokenomics means for engineering teams and developer productivity. They debate whether tokens are replacing developer time, why AI productivity gains are so inconsistent, and what makes a great engineer when English becomes the new programming language. They also look at what AI token costs do to engineering budgets, and whether SaaS is dead.
Episode 24: Agentic SaaS Talks, 2025 Year in Review
Michael Cooper, Bill Tarr, Markus Kaiser and Ermin Dzinic review 2025 on Agentic SaaS Talks and make predictions for 2026. They trace the show from SaaS Mondays articles to the current name and 19 guest episodes, and Markus recalls AI coding hallucinating functions at the end of 2024 before it became a required skill by April or May. Bill revisits the Rox episode and the one-person unicorn, and the panel covers the HoneySales pivot, John Lorance on abstracting cloud primitives, and digital identity for people and agents. Predictions include fewer acqui-hires, data companies gaining, LLMs becoming commodities, control planes growing in importance, and context engineering as the word of 2026. Listeners get a candid account of what changed for SaaS founders and engineers during 2025.
Episode 20: The Agentic SaaS Executive Summit - Live Event
A live summit at AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas, hosted by Bill Tarr, with two panels. The first asks whether agentic AI is revolution, evolution or hype, with Shriram Sridharan of Rox, Guy Korland of FalkorDB, Mihir Pandya of Scale AI and Alok Nikhil of Omnistrate. It covers seat, usage and outcome-based pricing, the return of bring-your-own-cloud deployments, and enterprise demands for data lineage. The second covers commercializing open source with Peter Farkas and Peter Zaitsev of Percona, Gopi Duddi and Talina Shrotiya of Couchbase, and Kamal Gupta, including open core, license changes that cost communities trust, and foundation-owned projects such as Linux and Kubernetes. Founders deciding how to price agentic software or monetize open source can compare specific positions.
Episode 19: Leaning into Agentic: How HoneySales Pivoted to an AI-Driven Future
Michael Cooper, Markus Kaiser and Ermin Dzinic talk with Denis Zatsepin, CTO of HoneySales, about how the company went from a manual sales service to SaaS and then to a multi-agent product on AWS. The agents build ideal customer profiles, a job that a sales consultant would otherwise do by hand, because customers with a wrong ICP got little from the rest of the pipeline. Denis built the first prototype with the Strands Agents SDK as one container on Fargate behind a load balancer, and had a working application in two to three weeks. An orchestrator agent proved slow and opaque to users, so the team moved to direct chats with specialist agents that sync through a shared workflow tool. Founders and engineering leaders get a concrete account of what a pivot to agents changes in architecture and user experience.
Episode 18: Deploying Agentic Applications: From Multi-Tenant to "SaaS Anywhere"
In today's session, we're unpacking one of the most critical questions for modern AI companies: How do you actually deploy agentic applications? Join us as we break down how agentic systems will be deployed at scale, what changes SaaS companies must prepare for, and what the future of agent-driven architectures looks like.
Episode 21: From Open-Source to SaaS with Head of Engineering at Onehouse
Varun Madan, Head of Engineering at Onehouse, walks through the journey of transforming the open-source Apache Hudi project into a high-performance, enterprise-ready SaaS platform. Covers data lakehouse architecture, building SaaS offerings, and includes a live demo of real-time data ingestion.
Episode 17: Agentic Architectures: Building AI Apps that Think and Scale
AI applications are evolving from simple prompt-driven tools into agentic systems, intelligent applications that can reason, act, and adapt. But as builders race to bring these apps to market, the same questions keep coming up: What should we build ourselves? What should we leverage from the ecosystem? And how do we operate these apps as a managed service at scale? In this session, our guests unpack the architectural patterns, design choices, and deployment models shaping the next wave of agentic innovation. From front-end frameworks like Vercel + Next.js, to AWS-native AI services, to control planes that automate everything between, this is a blueprint for taking your Agentic App from prototype to managed platform.
Episode 16: From SaaS to Agentic SaaS: Autonomy, Orchestration & Opportunity
Welcome to Agentic SaaS Talks! For the past 16 episodes this series has been known as SaaS Monday, Live on Friday, our deep dives with AWS and some amazing founders and builders on how to design, build and scale great SaaS products. Today we're rebranding to reflect a massive shift in the industry: the rise of agentic systems, AI-driven software that acts autonomously, collaborates intelligently and continuously improves itself.
Episode 14: Accelerating Dev Experience & SaaS Testing
Exploring the future of SaaS Anywhere, how testing, virtualization, and cloud abstraction continue to move up the stack. Our guest of honor is Eli Aleyner, now Head of Technology Alliances at Docker and co-founder of AtomicJar, the team behind Testcontainers. Eli's career spans Pivotal, VMware Tanzu, AtomicJar, and now Docker, giving him a front-row seat to how infrastructure has evolved from virtualization to containerization to developer testing.
Episode 13: What Is a SaaS Control Plane? From Chaos to Control with Omnistrate's Founders
How do SaaS companies move from chaos to control? The answer: SaaS control planes, the mission control that powers scale, speed, and security across multi-tenant systems. Join the Omnistrate founders as they discuss building control planes for modern SaaS.
Episode 10: Growing a SaaS Subscription Business Model, with AWS Experts
This episode focuses on turning SaaS growth strategy into scalable revenue using proven frameworks from subscription leaders. AWS experts and Capgemini Director discuss subscription-based growth models and strategies for SaaS businesses.
Episode 8: SaaS Pricing Models and Packaging Strategy, with Schematic and AWS
In this episode of SaaS Mondays Live, we dive into one of the most critical, and often most challenging, aspects of SaaS growth: Pricing and Packaging. Flynn Glover (Founder & CEO of Schematic) and Akshay Patel (SaaS/AI Product Strategist at AWS) unpack proven pricing strategies, innovative packaging models, and the latest trends shaping how SaaS companies monetize.
Episode 6: Building Vertical SaaS with Plotline and Checkly Leaders
Leaders from Checkly and Plotline share lessons on building and scaling successful Vertical SaaS businesses. We explore how these companies carved out niches, delivered deep value to specific industries, and navigated the infrastructure, product, and growth challenges that come with building vertical-first platforms.
Episode 3: SaaS Deployment Models, From Fully Hosted to BYOC
Michael Cooper, Kamal Gupta, Bill Tarr and Markus Kaiser walk through the main SaaS deployment models, from fully hosted to private VPC to bring-your-own-cloud (BYOC). Kamal explains how the control plane came out of early AWS services like S3 and RDS, and why a deployment that depends on people running scripts is not SaaS. Bill compares silo and pooled tenancy, and contrasts PrivateLink, VPC peering and VPC Lattice for connecting to customer accounts. Markus covers data sovereignty, latency and intellectual property as reasons customers demand deployment in their own accounts, and Kamal argues Terraform alone cannot manage SaaS infrastructure. Founders weighing hosted against BYOC will leave with a way to work backwards from their customers' requirements.
Episode 1: How will AI Impact SaaS Builders
Michael Cooper hosts Kamal Gupta, Bill Tarr and Markus Kaiser in the first live stream of the show, then called SaaS Mondays, to ask whether AI kills SaaS. The panel says it does not: SaaS is a business model, and Bill Tarr's test for real SaaS is whether a company has a control plane. They cite US VC money going to AI rising from 22% in 2022 to 42% last year, then cover usage-based and outcome-based pricing, including bring-your-own-LLM as a way to cap customer spend. On architecture they discuss per-tenant long-running training jobs with checkpointing on costly GPUs, per-tenant models and RAG, headless SaaS where agents replace the application layer, and tenant isolation. Markus Kaiser adds the European view on data residency. Anyone building or running SaaS gets a practical list of what AI changes in pricing, deployment and multi-tenancy.