The WSJ recently ran an interesting article on the key challenges of moving to the cloud.
“When on-demand enterprise applications emerged about a decade ago, they were touted as a cheap and more flexible alternative to buying software outright – a move that comes with upfront infrastructure and licensing costs, on top of ongoing fees for maintenance, support, and upgrades. But in practice, these promises have been hard to fulfill”.
ISVs have long relied on product keys (otherwise known as software license keys) to ensure that their software is only being used by those entitled to do so. Oftentimes, these product keys are also used to control use of specific features, based on the agreement the end user has with the ISV. Despite the value these product keys hold, they pose a number of challenges for both ISVs and end users.
Maximizing the potential of any software product is a function of two aspects; maximizing sales and minimizing the waste investment (optimizing cost). Software publishers of cloud delivered applications don’t have to deal with the challenges of physical delivery of the product, yet their ability to reach all the market segments could be limited. Software publishers can realize greater potential from their offerings by optimizing the mix of their packages, pricing and investment in the right features.
It can be a balancing act when deciding what features to build into your software products. Some features have intrinsic value to the core functionality of the product, some features add a lot of marketing value, and there are some features that do nothing. How would you know which is which?
Cloud is changing the way Software Publishers (ISVs) are monetizing their offerings. An increasing amount of workload is now moving from on-premise to cloud. This transition is driven by two factors: what customers and/or competition are dictating, and the need for ISVs to expand their reach to new segments. As a result, more and more ISVs are making the inevitable move to cloud.