The latest improvements from SafeNet’s SentinelCloud.com service includes another great way for software vendors to monetize their offerings: custom usage metering.

I’ve been involved in over 100 different customer engagements since releasing Sentinel Cloud.  One thing continues to be clear: software vendors want the ability to leverage and use the cloud to monetize ongoing consumption of data.

I have seen this trend emerge in three different ways:

  1. Example 1: A software vendor in the design (CAD/CAM) space sells high value software to medium to large customers who use the software daily as part of their business.   This customer is interested in offering his software to a much smaller customer who may design only one or two designs a year.   He wants to use the cloud to offer smaller customers the ability to pay per design at a reduced rate without eroding his high value customer market.
  2. Example 2: A software vendor is offering a PaaS solution allowing other software vendors to take advantage of the features that his SDK offers.  It doesn’t matter to him how many times the SDK is installed through a third party solution.  Instead, he is more interested in how much value his software is adding as part of a complete package. To help measure this, he wants to track how many times features/functions of the SDK are used when integrated as part of a third party solution. This will allow him to bill to the software vendor at the end of the month for what value they derived from his offering.
  3. Example 3: A software vendor wants to not only view licensing features,  but also wants to price resources used (bandwidth, storage space, etc) to help scale his pricing from small to large customers.

SentinelCloud 1.1 offers this custom usage metering capability so each of the software vendor examples above can efficiently and easily monetize their SaaS offering.  Do you have a unique cloud pricing strategy that you’re considering?  Let me know.