By Jesintha Louis, Director, Cloud Solutions, G7 CR Technologies India Pvt Ltd.
ISVs – Independent Software Vendor’s key focus is solving business challenges of various organisations with their technology products and solutions. They bring in ready to use or click to start products and offer customisation as required to meet some of the unique requirements.
Most successful ISVs spend all their time and energy on their IP/Product. For instance, activities like introducing new features, constantly improving user experience and focusing on user adoption. If they were to host their product on their own cloud, there is an additional management overhead and they miss out on opportunities, as scaling on-prem takes time, then there is the business challenge of wasting all the upfront investments if a customer decides to cancel the subscription.
On a specific note, here is how Cloud allows ISVs to maximise their success by increasing revenue and profitability.
Grow your revenue – Sell more and onboard faster with cloud
Agility and Scale
With cloud’s known benefit of PAYG, ISVs can deploy their products in a days’ time. One of the ISV I worked with deployed a surveillance system for an assembly election in India in just seven days with over 50,000+ monitoring devices. Their cloud deployment had 275+ servers, 1363 TB of storage and you can imagine how it is impossible to do this without cloud.
Also, the Customer Immersion Program is a great way to sell technology products. Give your customers a demo environment. So, they can try before they buy. With Cloud’s agility you can run demo campaigns on a large scale and there are cloud providers that discount licensing fees for demo environments like windows server and SQL licenses if you have silver or gold partnership with them.
Global Presence
You choose and leverage cloud service provider who have global presence allowing you to expand and service customers across Geography not worrying about setting up offices and datacenter in different countries. Some of the top cloud service providers have datacenters in over 60+ Regions and 19 + Countries.
Joint GTM programs
Some of the Partnership lead cloud services providers also invest in Joint Go to Market campaigns that can help in bringing new opportunities for your product and invariably increasing your spend on their cloud platform. You must also try the marketplace some of the cloud providers have setup; it gives you an opportunity to reach their existing customers across 141 countries. The cloud providers also handle the billing for you. Hence, you don’t have to worry about the regulatory and tax requirements of each Country you want to sell in.
Operations efficacy
Security and Compliance
Cloud providers make security and compliance efforts seamless. You can use firewalls to SEIM systems on a monthly PAYG model and don’t have to make huge upfront investments and The cloud providers invest a lot of time and money in ensuring their datacenters are compliant with the regional and global compliance standards thus allowing ISVs deploy in confidence and meet any requirement from their end customer.
Reduce procurement and vendor management overhead
The marketplace not only allows ISV an opportunity to sell. But, you can also purchase third party products with a click of a button. Most ISVs, especially the ones working in highly regulated industry verticals are required to follow the deployment guidelines set by their customers. Some customers want Fortinet firewall, another Cisco or Palo alto, you can buy and deploy any of them straight from the marketplace and the cloud provider will send you one bill for everything.
While you may want to embrace cloud fully, here are few things that you must consider while taking that step towards cloud:
Work with a professional managed services partner
MSP’s can bring the knowledge and know-how of Cloud so you don’t end up enabling a service that you didn’t mean to and land up with a huge bill. The partner can also help you optimise your cloud spend by assisting you with the right sizing, licensing and deployment model. They can make you aware of any programs or offers available from the cloud provider. Also, finding good cloud Ops talent is a challenge and if you did; it will take a lot of time for the resource to have experience of that of a MSP. Because, MSP spend and learn not just from managing your deployment but a vast variety of other customer deployments.
PaaS-ification with caution
Moving to PaaS (Platform as a service) might be a great idea when you don’t want to invest in managing the deployment be it patches, updates or maintenance. But, ISVs need to differentiate and must proceed with caution while using PaaS to ensure they don’t lose out on their differentiator. Cloud will constitute a major portion of the product cost for the ISV and if you can spend time optimising your deployment on IaaS, that can serve as a differentiator while packaging your product to the market.