Five Reasons ISVs Should Embrace Cloud

Cloud computing holds far-reaching implications for many sectors of the IT industry, including a little known segment referred to as independent software vendors (ISVs). Today, ISVs are focusing on how to position their products as a service, which for most customers are considered operating expenses, rather than capital expenditures.

There are many reasons why ISVs focused on shortening their sales cycles and creating smoother deployments for their applications are realizing the benefits of partnering with cloud providers that have an ISV channel program. Doing so gives them access to a secure enterprise cloud and software-as-a-service (SaaS (News - Alert)) capabilities.

Among the benefits cloud brings to ISVs are access to new customers and increased revenues, according to Wayne Kiphart, senior director of services, sales and channels for Logicalis (News - Alert) US, who outlined five reasons ISVs should embrace the cloud.

1. Access to New Customers – Making applications available as a hosted solution frees both the ISV and the end user from the requirement to purchase costly infrastructure. End users who no longer want to make capital investments in additional IT infrastructure and personnel are making cloud or SaaS a requirement in their application selection criteria. Without a hosted or managed appliance solution, ISVs may miss out on the ability to sell to this growing base of IT-savvy customers.

2. Faster Time to Market – Leveraging a cloud provider that already has an experienced ISV channel program with an enterprise cloud infrastructure in place can enable the ISV to bring a cloud-based offering to market much faster than trying to build another delivery model in house. It’s crucial, however, for ISVs considering a partnership with a cloud provider to examine the kinds of managed services the provider offers. The goal is for the cloud provider to free the ISV – and its clients – from commonplace, yet time-consuming tasks like managing the infrastructure, monitoring incident reports and responding to alerts, giving both the ISV and its clients the ability to focus on what they each respectively do best.

3. Improved Customer Experience – Cloud providers that already have the right people, processes, facilities, enterprise architectures, tools and service desk offerings in place make it easy and cost-efficient for an ISV to leverage them on-demand. ITSM toolsets and SLAs keep chaos from becoming king. And solution providers that offer an application monitoring dashboard make it easy for the ISV to have visibility into their clients’ application experience with the ability to proactively respond to customer alerts in near real time.

4. Increased Revenues and Profit Margin – By partnering with a cloud provider with extensive managed service capabilities, ISVs can sell a complete solution, which allows them to access a new revenue stream that includes Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), application management, and other services they otherwise would not have been able to extend to their clients.

5. Stringent Security Measures – Enterprise cloud providers have to meet stringent process and control audits (i.e., SSAE-16) as well as help their customers meet industry-standard regulatory compliance needs such as PCI (News - Alert), HIPAA, GLBA, SOX, and FISMA. But security measures extend well beyond the regulatory to complete IT management including critical features like backups and disaster recovery as a service.

Taking it a step further, Logicalis, which is an MSP and IT provider, also recently offered six areas potential cloud adopters should think about.