Brace yourself – we are leaving the world of perpetuity and moving into a constant state of evolution! End-users are in the driver seat now and what they want they are going to get – if not from you, then from one of your largest competitors or a small start up that is willing to sell them the services they need, for the price they think is fair. You can have the most sophisticated, feature-rich offering on the market, but if you can’t offer flexible pricing and licensing models you will never reach your maximum potential! So what does it take to be agile? Read More
These days it seems like there are multiple opinions about the decision making process of CIO’s as it relates to software license acquisition, management, and their respective budgets. Multiple industry participants will wax eloquent on what the current generation of CIO’s will choose as their next move as a software acquisition strategy. Will they try to implement some sort of Software Asset Management tool to help them tag and track software which they have licensed (and as the argument goes, thereby reduce their expenses by only paying for what is being used if their contract allows for that), or will they go to a SaaS model where pay-per-use becomes a standard service model that achieves the same goal, albeit quite differently? View this article for one take on the CIO decision making process: http://www.siliconrepublic.com/strategy/item/17491-the-cloud-is-more-secure/ Read More
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. Read More