Today around 30 percent of all software is distributed online and predictions are that it will account for 70 percent of all software sold in 2 – 3 years. Clearly, the cloud has changed virtually everything in how software is developed, distributed and consumed. Most importantly, it has given customers much more control: whether B2B or B2C, buyers want instant gratification and “frictionless” self-service transactions.  This disruption is also affecting pricing models as customers become more demanding about subscriptions or pay-as-you-go models.

This unprecedented amount of change is a good thing for industry innovators, as their new business models and technologies are born into a market eager to trying new products and services.

Why struggle with the transition alone?

So what about existing businesses? How do you adapt and change successfully? Do you once again chase the early majority and risk cannibalizing your present sales, or do you stay and try to hold onto the laggards? How are you taking advantage of international markets – optimizing your existing sales channels or onboarding new ones that have marketing strength and local knowledge?

At Avangate we see more and more ISVs transition from perpetual to pay-as-you-go models such as freemium, rental, or subscription; experiment with new channels, partners and affiliates. Try, test, measure, decide. How better than with a single, modular platform, providing the operational agility to do all of this with minimum effort and risk?

This is what today’s launch of our SkyCommerce™ Suite is about: helping software and SaaS vendors take advantage of these disruptive changes, get to market faster, complement their

The wave is coming. Learn to surf!

existing systems, and manage their end-to-end subscriber lifecycles, offering a consistent customer experience at every channel.

We are just scratching the surface, as there is plenty to talk about on these themes. You will hear more from us on this blog.

In the meantime, we want to hear what YOU think.  Share with us your opinion on what disruptions you see in the market – are they opportunities or threats for your software business?

ReadWriteWeb - Web technology blog

Bob Walsh’s new book, “The Web Startup Success Guide” has just been officially launched on Amazon. As promised in my previous post, here is another example of what you’ll find in his book after purchase. It’s a cool interview he made with Marshall Kirkpatrick, Lead Writer at  ReadWriteWeb, who gives advice to tech startups on approaching him with newsworthy information. Hope you’ll find it useful as well, here’s the interview:

Bob: What’s the right way for startups to approach you who want you to write about them? What’s the wrong way?

Software Channel Survey Results - download now!

As you know, we’ve done a survey on how the crisis is impacting the channel distribution in the software industry. We’ve looked at the results and – although not statistically representative (survey conducted on the internet on a self-selected sample)-, they make an interesting reading, showing some trends and providing tips & solutions for channel challenges.

Frankly, I was (pleasantly) surprised to see how much weight both ISVs and resellers give to joint marketing programs, measuring, efficiency, communication…  obviously no one can afford to pay lip service to these actions, they are for real.

Encouragingly enough, vendors and resellers acknowledge the same top channel challenges and consider similar solutions for tackling problems.

No more than 20 questions :) and you will receive a full copy of the survey report.

I won’t lie to you: at the beginning of the month we had no intention of doing a survey on channel distribution in the software industry. Now we are.  More than that, we have put more and more effort into it as we were designing the questionnaire and it’s grown into this wonderful piece of research … It  became my baby project.

How has this all started? From a discussion about an ad we had to do for a reseller newsletter. We wanted to produce something different, not just a boring ad… but rather à la @Neil Davidson in his interruption marketing post. Well, we didn’t quite match Napoleon & the Hemorrhoids, nevertheless we did come up with something we believe is very useful and interesting to share with the world.