Shifting Gears: ISV Cloud On-boarding
Cloud On-boarding Roadmap
The large ISVs are changing the business strategies and business models – expanding the offerings from large enterprise customers to SMB & retail customers to drive growth, increase market penetration and offer competitive & cost-effective IT solutions out-of-the-box (managed). They are considering Cloud & SaaS technology strategies in realizing these business goals and analyzing the impact on the existing product & service lines to size the cloud adoption effort. They are also looking for innovative platform accelerators that can help reduce the time-to-market for cloud / SaaS on-boarding. In some of the more strategic discussions, I also noticed that the ISVs are asking for sharing the risk of cloud adoption – it is somewhat new venture from many of them from both business & technology perspective. By the way it was not new for me; I have seen the latest business trends around ISV sector, wherein the innovation in product engineering is accelerated through trusted partnerships, alliances and joint go-to-market solutions with large system integrators.
Industry Trends
Some of the large ISVs are leading this change and driving the industry trends for e.g. Microsoft, SalesForce.com etc, many of them are still catching-up some-of-them in more strategic-way & some-of-them in more tactical-way forced by the industry. I also feel that there is a sense of fear – the cloud computing infrastructure-as-a-service wave had a significant impact on hosting providers, anyone who has not aligned it with this trend, is almost going to go out-of-business very soon. Similarly, the ISVs are the next players who will be hit by cloud computing platform-as-a-service and software-as-a-service waves. Of course, the system integrators are the next in terms of changes in the outsourcing models largely driven by ADM solutions & services to managed solutions & services based outsourcing, the recent leading analyst firm reports that 8% of the outsourcing models will run on SaaS based models in next 1 year.
From business ecosystem perspective, ISVs On-boarding on Cloud creates a new, sustainable and economically scalable business environment for all stakeholders – customers, ISVs and system integrators. ISVs achieve growth, Customers get more cost effective solution options and System Integrators find new revenue channels.
The economy, customers & technology is driving the change: the hosting providers, ISVs and Outsourcing providers have to shift the gears to survive & grow!
