As a long time partner for ISV’s in the software B2B market, we are often asked for help competing in a market that is becoming more and more cloud centric. Typically ISV’s have made a long term investment in applications that are deployed on-premise and therefore cannot efficiently be offered as a service.

Though virtualization technologies are becoming more and more efficient through well-known players and new startups, there still remains a core challenge – these applications are not built for cost-effective multitenant deployments. Each instance needs its own environment and therefore delivers only moderate savings. From the ISV’s perspective this sounds like the need to reinvent the wheel and redevelop all features that are available on-premise using a new web technology for building cloud applications  to enable multitenant deployments and horizontal scaling. The big challenge this presents is that all these hours developing technology that have been invested in on-premise now need to get reinvested once again for the cloud. Obviously this becomes one of the biggest challenges for the ISV on their move to the cloud.

Economically, this is not easy to justify as we are helping our customers to achieve the same cloud-like TCO for their customer, but on a route allowing the ISV to reuse their existing technology.

What are the Core Elements in Cloud to Reduce TCO?

Let’s start with considering your business model. Consumption-as-a-service is a one way to reduce TCO. This can easily be supported by offering the matching license models such as subscription and metered or usage-based models.  These models can take the shape of prepaid or postpaid, with tier based price breaks based on usage.

The second piece is the requirement of fewer resources on the user’s end. Today, the hardware used to run the applications has become even more powerful – so no need to slim down the processing requirements of the target machine. As a result, it is mainly IT management where cloud plays the TCO card. No install. No update. No storage. No enterprise license manager required.

But all of this is also achievable using proven technology, so there is no need to reinvent all features in the cloud.

Using SafeNet’s software monetization technology our customers are able to:

  1. Deploy applications like a dynamically downloaded web page –  download and start
    • Once the application does not need a lengthy install process, the users can pull the latest version to the machine they want to use it on, at any time they want. If this gets integrated with a central portal in the cloud, all the users will easily find it and pick it up.
  2. Follow the current entitlement deployment
    • Using Sentinel technology, the entitlement can follow the user automatically. No need to deploy licenses to all machines or have a VPN connection to talk to a corporate license manager.
  3. Manage data in the cloud
    • Allow the users to manage the data they work on in the cloud, making it available from everywhere. There is no need to build your own services, just use an application independent service provider.
  4. Remove the need for a corporate network license manager
    • No matter if the old machine died,  if the user just happens to use the application on a new machine today, or if the license gets shared between different users, there is no need to impose the installation of an old fashioned corporate license manager on the customer. No IT resources required. At SafeNet, this gets delivered from the redundant and highly scalable Sentinel Cloud Service.

Based on these cornerstones, on-premise application can reduce TCO as low as with SaaS application management, but with the significant advantage that the ISV does not need to rebuild their application. They can directly deliver the full functionality to all customers, dynamically,  straight out of the cloud.