Today’s Tough Requirements

eCommerce is quickly becoming the mainstream – regardless of the type of goods or services you are selling.  For digital goods and software in particular, eCommerce is quickly becoming mission critical. Today’s consumers and businesses alike require a faster, more convenient way to access and purchase digital goods anytime, anyplace, on any device.  Agile commerce will soon be considered a “must” rather than a “nice to have.”

This means that software and digital goods vendors face the challenge of managing downloads and subscription-based access, advanced licensing requirements, product security/ DRM, plus managing the customer experience across the product lifecycle, channels and devices. The rapid rise of subscription-based products and SaaS only serves to amplify this need (SaaS sales are forecasted to reach around $48BN in 2014 from $17BN in 2010).

To leverage the opportunities, as well as to stay relevant in the face of increasing competition, eCommerce professionals are also looking to expand to new markets and geographies, embrace new revenue and licensing models, multiply their sales efforts through affiliates and other channels, optimize online campaigns and buying processes … and the list goes on.  Just to expand to new geographies alone brings its own set of challenges: local payment methods, ordering interface languages, shopper support (local numbers, languages), billing currencies, taxation, etc. All of these require business intelligence, expertise, industry insights and additional services to support internal teams.

How Are You Benchmarking Your eCommerce Efforts?

Is your in-house solution or ecommerce provider offering the needed flexibility and broad palette of capabilities?  Want to try something new or simply to benchmark your current eCommerce platform?  Do you need flexibility in terms of adopting new business models or ways to get to market, including questions like being the merchant of record, service provider, or both?

Evaluating solutions when you have multifaceted requirements is a daunting task. Not to worry, help is at hand.  Forrester Research Inc. recently released their report, “Market Overview: Digital Commerce Solutions 2011”, highlighting providers that are changing the game in terms of how digital goods are taken to market, bought and used.

Market Overview: Digital Commerce Solutions 2011

The Forrester report takes a look at the key solutions available today and lays out simple steps for selecting the digital commerce provider that is right for you

The report recommends:

• Focus on the unique needs of your vertical
• Identify future-state business models
• Beware of the pitfalls of outsourcing operations functions
• Consider niche solutions where appropriate
• Focus on building a digital relationship with your customers
• Use Forrester’s scenario-based technology evaluation process (STEP) to ensure your business and customer goals are met

Core to their recommendation is that software and other digital goods vendors look at their long-term digital commerce strategy, and select eCommerce vendors that have the flexibility and scalability to meet their rapidly evolving needs in this dynamic digital goods marketplace.

Get Your Complimentary Report Now

Avangate is offering the “Market Overview: Digital Commerce Solutions 2011”report complimentary to software, SaaS and digital goods vendors.  You can download the report here and feel free to comment below on what you see as key elements of an ecommerce solution that can take you forward in 2012 and beyond.


2011 – A year of tremendous expansion in how we serve our Software and SaaS customers

When I end a year, I like to take a moment to step back and appreciate what we accomplished.  2011 has been an incredibly exciting year for Avangate.

We launched our new SkyCommerce Suite, expanded our overall service with close to 1.000 new features and enhancements, delivered new marketing and optimization services, and extended our global presence with new team members and offices, including our new North American headquarters in Redwood Shores, California.  All of this with the aim of helping our customers sell more software through any channel and any model.

It is not too surprising that the software market continues to grow as software plays an increasingly important role in our world (see Andresseen’s view on how “Software is Eating the World“).  More interestingly is the massive shift in how software is being distributed and sold.   The market size of ESD and SaaS will grow from $45Bln to over $120Bln by 2014.  The 3TS Cisco Growth Fund recognized this opportunity with a $6 million investment in Avangate in March of this year, accelerating our growth and strengthening our global presence.

We’ve been honored to serve this market – we participated in, sponsored or organized over fourteen events this year to network, share ideas, and help our customers grow their businesses.  We now have over 2,000 clients, from some of the largest vendors of consumer software titles, such as Bitdefender and Kaspersky, to SaaS vendors including Terapeak and TeamLab.

In addition, our affiliate network has grown to over 27,000 software members – Majorgeeks, Siliconaction.com.br and TopTenServices.net are three power affiliates that joined in 2011.  I’m incredibly proud of the Avangate team for continuing to deliver a mature platform with the scale and flexibility to serve shareware, mid-market, and enterprise software and SaaS companies.  What’s more, we are honored to be recognized in Forrester’s recent report on Solutions For Digital Commerce.

2012 – Prediction, Cloudy with a Chance of Significant Growth

The cloud is not a new concept, but we see this trend accelerating to dominate future initiatives (8 out of 10 new software start-ups are SaaS). The software market will only continue to be driven and disrupted by the rise of the cloud.

What does this boil down to? I particularly liked a blog post by Louis Columbus talking about “stripping away the hype by asking how these technologies [analytics, big data and cloud computing] contribute to excellent customer experiences and greater customer engagement.  Those are the real catalysts of market growth and the greatest disruptive forces at work in enterprise software today.”

While there are many predictions for 2012 (many articles are mentioning growth for next year which is good news – here’s one example about the antivirus sub-vertical; and also check out this Boxing Day treat by Ray Wang), let us spotlight one that is specifically apt for software companies: the transition from systems of transaction to systems of engagements and experience.

Software: engagement across the lifecycle

We feel this is important and has many implications for a software company. As many ISVs transition from perpetual to pay-as-you-go models such as freemium, rental, or subscription, they need to also experiment with new partners and affiliates and manage sales worldwide through any channel, online and offline.  The challenge is to do this while providing a flexible and frictionless customer experience across the software lifecycle. We have focused on this in 2011 with our integrated SkyCommerce solution and are continuing this focus into 2012.

Software companies need to have the platform to effectively engage and create the right experiences for their customers and need to be able to do it in a way that complements, and not alienates, the resellers which still make up over 50% of software sales today.

Likewise, software resellers and distributors need to be able to take advantage of these industry shifts, continue to increasingly migrate their businesses online and focus on emerging trends, such as aggregating cloud services.

Meet with us

Stay tuned for new and exciting things we’ve planned for 2012. To start with, meet the team at the first industry event we’re attending next year: Affiliate Summit West, January 8-10, Las Vegas, USA.

Happy 2012 and best wishes from all of us here at Avangate!

P.S. Your point of view for 2012?

We would love to hear what you think are some of the key trends that will drive your sales in 2012. We will continue to build upon these issues into the New Year on this blog and look forward to continuing the conversation!

I hope your office/home/coffee place is also filled with a pleasant pine and freshly peeled oranges scent and you feel the slowing rhythm of everybody and everything around you.
We are also enjoying this time of the year and are spending most of our time on summing up and drawing conclusions for 2010 and deciding on our future actions for 2011. Of course, I want to share with you here some of the milestones of Avangate in 2010 :).

Mountain View, California… this is the way press releases from Avangate US will begin from now on. But to reach this goal (i.e. the Silicon Valley office) there was (and will be from now on) a tremendous work to be done.

The first step was the Board decision on expanding US operations. Basically Avangate needed fresh blood in US land to feed a healthy business.

The business development itself it’s not a complicated process; you need someone that knows the industry, has good connections and is ready to dedicate a big part of his life to his job.

The business deployment is another story. You need someone inside the company who knows the business in all its details, knows the company culture and is also willing to involve himself in this operation. And that person was me :).