The software industry is in the midst of a dramatic shift. No software publisher big or small will be left unaffected by enterprise and consumer end-users’ growing preference to consume their software as on-demand services. According to industry-leading analyst firm IDC, by 2010 nearly 65% of new product from established ISVs will be delivered as SaaS services and nearly 85% of net-new software firms coming to market will be built around SaaS service composition and delivery.  As a software publisher, the question you should be asking yourself is not how to avoid the cloud – but how to navigate a migration to the cloud for all or some of your applications as quickly and efficiently as possible. In a recent presentation, Saugatuck Technology’s Mike West made it quite clear that every aspect of an ISV’s business will be impacted by a shift to SaaS, from business planning and management, technology development and operational processes, and even corporate culture.

Fortunately there is a wealth of information available to help with this journey – from case studies, to experienced consultants and industry analysts, and –as we will discuss in this blog series– the same lessons learned throughout the evolution of traditional software delivery. At SafeNet I am a member of the company’s cloud service delivery team. The sole objective of our team throughout the past 18 months has been bringing to market a solution that not only slickly operates in a cloud environment but also truly ensures business continuity for our more than 5K existing customers. The first milestone we had to achieve internally was going through the process of delivering our traditionally on-premise software as a service for cloud service providers and migrating customers. During this time we had countless meetings with customers in the process of migrating, established SaaS providers, and cloud industry thought leaders, analysts, and solution vendors.  Looking back it became clear, not only do software publishers need a solution to help them monetize their applications in the cloud, then need a defined path to profitability – something SafeNet is favorably poised to provide.

Surprisingly (or not), when you take a look under the hood of today’s SaaS experience – the main obstacles are not foreign to the obstacles faced by on-prem ISVs to-date. In fact – just mapping the most common restrictions to the root business problem should make this clear:

My colleague Todd Steel already took a journey down the path of business intelligence in the cloud in his post “Software Licensing & Entitlement Management for Product Managers”. I will focus on the other five business challenges in a series of upcoming entries incorporating lessons learned from some of the industry’s largest SaaS vendors.  Don’t want to wait – SafeNet and Saugatuck Technology recently hosted a live webinar on this very topic that you can a view on-demand anytime. Gain access to visiting www.safenet-inc.com/NavigateTheCloud.

Let’s make the coming discussion interactive – I would love to hear your feedback and field questions as we go! Post your comments here or contact me directly at SaaS@safenet-inc.com