The Enterprise Pull: Why the Fortune 500 Is Rewriting the Software Delivery Playbook
Major enterprises are no longer content with standard SaaS or DIY self-hosting—they are actively seeking a third way to run your software in their clouds.
Mark Milligan
VP of Revenue
We built Nuon to help software vendors deliver their software in a Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) way, where their customers get the hands-free benefits of SaaS while keeping their data running in their own cloud accounts. But the phone’s been ringing from the other side of the table.
We haven’t just been talking with software vendors. We’ve been talking with their customers, too, typically enterprises like the Fortune 500. We’re talking with CTOs and heads of Platform Engineering who are frustrated. They have the budget, they have cloud credits to burn down, and they have demand within their organizations for modern software like observability, distributed databases, low code, AI code-gen, AI agents, and more. What they don’t have is a way to run these vendor software products in their cloud accounts — not the vendor’s — without a massive operational headache or the risk of the vendor’s multi-tenant SaaS.
The Trojan Horse of BYOC Cost
When vendors say “Yes, we can run in your cloud,” they often don’t mean “We have a product for that.” What they really mean is “We will write a Statement of Work and throw humans at the problem.” Put another way, these BYOC approaches are bespoke, customer-specific implementations with day-2 headaches to come.
We see vendors offering BYOC to the top 1% of deals (the “whales”). They are willing to sacrifice margins and use forward deployed engineers in order to secure massively valuable contracts that can bring in $1 million or more in ARR.
If a vendor markets BYOC on their website, you’ll often find no documentation and only a “Contact Sales” form.
For the customer, what looks like procuring software licenses turns into a services engagement involving long implementation times, custom maintenance contracts, and scheduled downtime for manual upgrades.
Nuon turns this concept of manually providing services on its head and instead offers a cloud-native software platform that is automated, scalable, agile, and less expensive.
The DIY Trap
Software vendors are embracing BYOC, but only reluctantly. It's true that some software startups and established pure-play vendors are going BYOC first for a competitive advantage and to keep their costs down over SaaS. But the established vendors see BYOC as basically a DIY “Break Glass in Case of Emergency” option to win a massive contract. Vendors know what customers want to hear — “my data is in my cloud” — so market their offerings to that tune.
Vendors will still tune their licensing, feature development, and support to naturally coax customers to their primary deployment options like multi-tenant SaaS or self-hosting.
The insight here is that this friction is costing vendors revenue since they are dialing their BYOC offerings to hail-mary, long-sales-cycle opportunities while missing out on small, medium, and large customers who have data sovereignty and ease-of-maintenance requirements.
On the other hand, customers are getting a professional services-as-license offer that makes self-hosting almost look more attractive. Customers are not saying “no” to the vendor’s product; they are saying “no” to the delivery method.
The New Customer Demand: BYOC as a Standard
Enterprises are telling us their vendor wishlists.
Enterprises have already cobbled together self-hosted deployments of durable execution engines and observability platforms and spent blood and treasure to make them production-grade. If they knew about Nuon, they would have told these vendors they’d have to BYOC with Nuon if they wanted their business.
And now it’s all about AI. Enterprises want to run agentic platforms and code generation platforms like Cursor and Claude Code in their infrastructure, but can’t. The vendors don’t want to architect their product to be self-hosted and deployed in the customer’s cloud infrastructure.
Enterprises are even willing to make introductions to these vendors to convince them to adopt a proper BYOC offering.
It’s worth restating that customers want the experience of SaaS (managed, updated, hands-off) with the location of self-hosting (their cloud, their credits, their security).
Customers don’t just want self-hosted; they want vendor-managed BYOC.
Enterprises Taking Control
The inversion we’re witnessing is that enterprises are asking Nuon how our platform can sit within their continuous deployment infrastructure, to more quickly install and operate their long tail of vendor software.
Enterprises are taking a proactive approach where, if the software vendors are not building a first-class BYOC experience, they will build the vendor software harness for them, with Nuon.
This potentially signals a massive power shift. The enterprise is now dictating the infrastructure layer. They want a universal software loader for vendor applications in their clouds.
We spoke with a US government agency who compared this trend to when they mandated their software vendors offer their products on Kubernetes a decade ago.
Matching Architecture to Infrastructure
Software vendors have varying motivations for the type of BYOC architecture they want to deploy.
An AI, distributed database, ELT, or S3 vendor wants to maintain a multi-tenant control plane but install the data plane in the customer’s cloud, aka split plane architecture. An application vendor follows regulated industry standards and installs the control and data plane into the customer’s cloud.
Not all customers want a greenfield implementation where the vendor creates the VPC, Kubernetes clusters, and deploys their app with Helm or a Kubernetes operator. Some customers prefer a brownfield approach and will want vendors to re-use their VPCs, even their Kubernetes clusters.
Pets to Cattle in a Diverse Architecture World
One reason that software vendors struggle to scale their BYOC offerings — and why enterprises are looking to platform solutions — is that many vendors treat their BYOC deployments like pets.
Each installation is hand-raised like a beloved family pet, unique to that customer’s environment, and requires humans to feed and care for it.
Both software vendors and enterprises would probably agree that right-sizing BYOC where it’s possible to support the architecture styles that vendors and enterprises demand, is a lower cost and better return on investment than the brute force, manual ways.
Vendors can still win the whale-sized deals, while supporting them in a repeatable way and opening up additional enterprise customers of all sizes. Even smaller enterprises have data sovereignty requirements and want a SaaS-like experience where the vendor is responsible for the installation and operation of their software.
From Snowflake to Standard
To the software vendors, we hope that you do not treat BYOC as an edge case. If you make it a first-class citizen (with a platform like Nuon), you unlock large, medium, and small customer budgets.
For the enterprises, Nuon is listening to you. The software deployment model paradigm is changing, and we are building the continuous deployment bridge to make “Your Cloud, Their App” the standard, rather than the exception.
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