In the Channel: VARs Put a Different Face on SaaS

According to a 2005 AMR Research study of 500 respondents representing companies of all sizes, more than 78 percent said they are currently using or considering SaaS. As ISVs push SaaS applications into the mainstream, ISVs and VARs need to consider likely changes to the channel economic model. One of these changes is likely to be a shift in the balance of power toward full-service VARs. While ISVs will find some of these changes hard to swallow, they need to keep in mind that this is the cost of extending the reach of their applications into additional market segments.

OPTIMIZE: Best Of

Virtualization in the Real World

Conventional wisdom, in lumping Second Life with MySpace, FaceBook and other social networking sites, dismisses it as merely a social site. By “dismisses” I don’t mean to say that people think as a phenomena it is unimportant and can be ignored, but merely that they think of its impact solely in terms of social interaction. I am more convinced than ever that Second Life is really a new medium of virtualization, and is far more revolutionary than most people realize.

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Fine Tune Your Marketing & Distribution Chain

“Am I leaving money on the table?”

You know you’ve got a first-rate product and the best price point. So why aren’t buyers jumping at your technology? Somewhere between you and your customers there is a barrier to adoption. Are the retailers you counted on last year now failing to deliver? Is there a simple vehicle change that can open up government buying? Is your customer base waiting for certain key players to adopt your technology before they are willing to buy?

What we deliver:

Optimization plans. We’re experts at fine-tuning marketing and sales models for maximum results. We take a fresh look at your pricing, licensing vehicles, channel dynamics and customer behavior to make specific, pragmatic recommendations, clearing the path of least resistance between you and your customers’ untapped dollars. The result: maximum sales.

Examples of Our Work

We helped a global software company restructure its licensing program to improve competitiveness, motivate the channel to migrate toward selling volume licenses, and drive enterprise-level deployment. At the same time, we made the model flexible enough to accommodate both “push” and “pull” products based on the market environment. In the first six months following adoption of our recommendations, our client captured an additional $28 million in profit.
A major software company grew quickly through more than 25 acquisitions. The result was a confusing patchwork of different pricing models, many driven by simplistic guesses rather than rigorous analysis. We helped the company design a set of processes to make sure decisions were made rigorously and were well understood by everyone concerned, and a set of metrics used to gauge the success or failure of pricing actions.

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