Independent Software Vendors, ISVs, comes in many shapes and the ISV ecosystem universe is big! The old business model of selling a license once and then charge a small annual fee of 10-12% for maintenance and upgrade rights are more or less gone although we still see it. Most ISVs have now made the transition to a subscription-based model where the customer pays the same fee year over year per seat. Perhaps Microsoft were the pioneers with the Open Value Subscription (OSV) licensing model that have now been replaced with Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) model.
Anyway, in today’s ISV ecosystem, most ISVs will offer their solution at a subscription-based model, but the delivery will differ depending on various factors such as vertical, type of solution and security concerns. The traditional delivery is a bespoke installation for every customer and the customer decides himself where to install, i.e. in his own datacenter, co-location, in a hoster’s environment or up in the cloud. The customer or his IT partner will take care of the wellbeing and maintenance of the application.
At the other end we see that ISVs have developed a ISV cloud strategy which includes a move to the cloud. They have embraced the Software as a Service (SaaS) business model where the customer does not need to care about anything related to the infrastructure and just pays for a seat on a monthly basis and all customers will be inside the same multi-tenant installation. Being a ISV SaaS is now the norm for net new applications and many ISVs with a legacy portfolio got this in their multi-year roadmaps but for various reasons, it takes time to make the transition which we fully recognize and respect.
Our solution is simple! At Idenxt we got the methodology and experience to enable ISVs with legacy portfolios so that they can offer their applications per seat together with all cloud management outsourcing needed – and at a fixed monthly price. There are plenty of Azure application hosting options. That means that customers do not need to think about taking care of the hosting themselves, instead we will do it for them and run their application in Azure. This will give customers to ISVs a ‘SaaS-like’ experience to the benefit of both ISV and customer. And we know that making it easier to do business with each other, often results in the number of business opportunities dramatically increases!
Partnering with Idenxt will also enable ISVs to gradually move to a true SaaS world as we take out the drama of making the shift. When adopting and implementing a software as a service you need someone that have done it before! We love the ISV ecosystem and we know how to navigate!