License and Secure prodefis Cloud (SaaS)

Flexible Delivery Models

PRODEFIS offers two delivery models for its software products. It is intended to ease your decision-making while considering the requirements of your organization.

The License Model is the traditional software delivery model, sometimes referred to as the on-premise model. In this model you acquire licenses of our products which will be installed and run on computers on the premises of your airline/training organization or of your external hosting partner. This model requires higher up-front costs, higher on-going maintenance costs and an IT department for running the necessary infrastructure. The IT department can be in-house or external.

The biggest advantage of this model is the provided flexibility: you’ll have full access to your data at any time and you’ll decide when to move to new releases since there is no need to coordinate planned system outages with other airlines/organizations. In addition you’ll have the unrestricted possibility to integrate our products with your existing operations systems.

prodefis offers two kinds of licenses:
Perpetual Licenses
You pay a one-time fee for a license which will be perpetually valid.
Annual License Rental
You pay annual fees for the rental of licenses.

Secure prodefis Cloud (SaaS) means that the software is not installed on your premises. Instead you access and use the software over the Internet. This approach has many advantages over the license model:

  • The initial deployment of a software product requires significantly less time and efforts. You don’t have to care about complex IT infrastructure. Instead you can focus on your core business.
  • The total cost of using the software is lower.
  • You can test the software before opting for it. This reduces your risks to a minimum.

The traditional SaaS (Software as a Service) model which is usually offered by other companies has some drawbacks. The biggest one is the lack of integration with your existing systems.

In order to address the drawbacks of the traditional SaaS and to align the delivery model with our customers’ needs we’ve introduced the prodefis Cloud offering the following additional features:

Additional Features of prodefis Cloud
Integration with Your Existing Systems

You can use our software as a service while having the possibility to integrate it with your airline’s operation systems or with any other back office system running at your site. Depending on your needs, a real-time integration is also possible.

SaaS and Offline Operation

It sounds contradictorily and not possible to run SaaS while being disconnected from the Internet. But our SaaS architecture enables this. A sample scenario: for detailed grading of pilots on line checks it is necessary to be able to run TPMS offline, i.e. without an Internet connection. Our SaaS model allows us to offer this feature also to those clients using TPMS as SaaS.

Switching from SaaS to License Model

Even if you prefer the license model you could find the prodefis SaaS model interesting for you. Two sample scenarios:

  • You would like to start using one of our products as soon as possible but you are short of budget. In this case you could start using our software as a service which means significantly less up-front costs.
  • You would like to start using one of our products as soon as possible but your internal processes don’t allow a quick deployment. In this case you could start using our software as a service even within days if required.

At a later point in time you can decide to switch to the license model. We will support this so that all your data and configuration will become available after the switch to the license model.

SaaS Model and Test Environments

We also offer test environments as a service. For example, you want to introduce a new version of your operations system and want to test the integration with our products, too. Simply ask us and we’ll set-up a new test environment for you: based on your own data and integrated with the test environment at your site. This is usually not possible in combination with the SaaS model but actually a fundamental requirement.

Trial Operations

You can test our software before opting for it. Our SaaS model allows us to provide you with a trial operation. The transition from the trial operation to the regular operation is just a matter of changing configuration parameters.

No Need for Additional Terminal Servers and Clients

From the very first the architecture of the prodefis products was designed to support the SaaS delivery model. Initial software installations are usually not necessary and also subsequent rollouts of new releases are usually possible without additional efforts. The clients connect to the servers over the Internet via secured standard Internet protocols. The clients can access the servers without any problems, even through proxy servers. So there is no need for additional software for terminal servers and clients.