Understanding the benefits of Saas for ISVs

Software-as-a Service (SaaS) is increasingly becoming the preferred delivery model for many businesses. For independent software vendors (ISVs), the rewards of embracing SaaS are manifold and include offering better customer value, increasing market competitiveness and adopting agile processes. Ultimately, SaaS offers the opportunity to drive growth – and at scale. By delivering applications in the cloud, ISVs can free themselves of the restrictions of their on-premises monolithic applications and embrace a new SaaS world.

On talking with many ISVs, we have identified a number of motivations for product modernisation. Like any business, gaining new clients is considered a key driver. Because cloud-delivered applications offer a broad reach, ISVs are able to enter new market segments and target new geographies. Secondly, we hear that the ability to benefit from recurring revenues using a subscription-based pricing model is of great importance, because it offers a far more predictable revenue model. Another key motivation comes from the ease of innovation: agile processes and access to scalable compute power mean that ISVs can provide their users with new features and updates quickly and efficiently.

The added value of SaaS for ISVs

SaaS can offer even more value beyond those three drivers. Using the cloud, ISVs can better monitor application performance and the supporting IT infrastructure. Security is made easier with centralised security management. Real-time, automatic updates make preventative maintenance easier, too. Additionally, the adoption of agile constructs can help reduce inefficiencies and lower development costs for everyone from sales teams to developers to the customer success team. This results in the ability to react to market trends, customer needs and competitor advances.

At SoftwareOne, we realise that ISVs need a strong partner on the journey to SaaS, which is why we developed the NextGen ISV Programme to support ISVs to become fully optimised and modernised SaaS providers. By adopting cloud best practices, implementing cloud FinOps and automating testing, a number of our NextGen ISV Programme clients have reduced total cost of ownership (TCO) by 20% and seen a 10% increase in business growth – as a minimum.

The road to modernisation

The NextGen ISV Programme consists of several phases. We help ISV clients to first create their vision for SaaS and then assess their current capabilities, IT needs and any barriers to cloud adoption that need addressing. Then we help the ISV get a clear idea of what a future SaaS-transformed product would look like. From there we build the modernisation business case and ensure the SaaS product gets full technical validation. This informs the development of a solid roadmap for transformation making the modernisation process as effective and painless as possible.

Once SaaS modernisation is complete, ISVs can count on SoftwareOne for continued support. We help to optimise and control costs through the application of our proven FinOps framework. We also offer go-to-market (GTM) support, such as for co-marketing and co-selling using hyperscaler marketplaces – this measure alone can help accelerate GTM success.