With conservative estimates predicting the Software as a Service (SaaS) market is set to grow at more than 17% a year[1], ISVs cannot afford to waste energy worrying about the crucial basics of their IT infrastructure.
Instead, their focus must be on quickly developing and bringing to market pioneering new services ahead of competitors if they are to seize emerging opportunities. Recognising this, Sungard Availability Services and Cisco have joined forces to give Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) a shortcut to market by offering infrastructure already certified for many of their markets. This ultimately enables them to start earning revenue from their innovations sooner.
This is timely as new IDG research reveals that ISVs face many provisioning challenges as they strive to achieve their business goals of improving service, delivering growth and product development. Given the reputational damage that data loss and downtime can cause and the potentially large fines regulators can impose for data security breaches, physical and information security is their number one concern. Understandably, many ISVs also worry that cloud-hosted infrastructure is not able to deliver the uptime, application performance and backup capabilities to match on-premise systems, with system integration being another common worry.
But as our customers like Apply Financial, Tenet Group and Transics know from experience, ISVs can trust that their software is hosted on a world-class infrastructure based on Cisco-powered foundations. In addition, they can also benefit from added support, solutions and guidance through the award-winning Cisco Partner Program. This is designed to help ISVs develop ways to connect with their market, build strong partner relationships and receive rewards or even funding for customer activities. This last point is particularly welcome in a typically low margin cloud service environment which necessitates tight control of costs.
Switching to a SaaS-based application delivery model is not easy for ISVs, which no longer have the guarantee of annual income based on software licence renewals. For this reason, ensuring that the underlying hosting infrastructure has the flexibility to adapt to changing utilisation rates while minimising datacentre, hardware, power, cooling and maintenance costs to maximise profits is a difficult balancing act but one that is nevertheless critical to an ISV’s commercial success.
If you’d like to find out more, speak to your Account Manager, call us on 1800 938 122 or email avail@sungardas.com
[1] Source: IDG report ‘The changing landscape for business software’ – September 2015