How Web Services Can Help ISVs Repackage Their Software Offerings to Better ReachServe Existing Markets

How Web Services Can Help ISVs Repackage Their Software Offerings to Better Reach/Serve Existing Markets

Web services present independent software vendors (ISVs) with several new options to repackage applications as "hosted services" that can be sold on a per-seat, per-use, or subscription basis to existing clients and new prospects.

Here is an example of such repackaging:

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Visualize, Inc. Using Web Services to Repackage Existing Applications to Open New Markets

Visualize, Inc. is a maker of data-visualization software the kind of software that enables decision makers to view "flat" two-dimensional (height and width) data in three dimensions (height, width, and depth). This kind of software is highly useful in helping business decision makers take spreadsheet-type data and visualize it using three-dimensional charts.

Recently, a number of Visualize prospects have expressed a desire to use Visualize software, but they have been unable to persuade their IT departments to install, run, and manage Visualize code. These prospects have shown a preference for having data-visualization software hosted by some other company and provided to them as a service.

By making some of its data-visualization products available as a "Web service," Visualize can offer its data-visualization software as a chargeable service. By listing its product in a UDDI directory (a planned activity), the company will be able to make itself "known" to other applications. By offering its product as a service, the company may be able to actually charge more because it provides an application and a processing service for its customers.

This Visualize example is interesting from multiple perspectives. As a small company, Visualize needs to find ways to broaden its market share as well as ways to contain costs. By repackaging some of its software products, Visualize is hoping to make it easier for some potential buyers to use them (because those prospective buyers would not need their IT department to install and maintain the software). Making the software easier to buy should help increase market share.

From a cost-of-doing-business perspective, when Visualize ultimately lists its products in public UDDI directories, the company should be able to reduce its cost of doing business by lowering its SG&A costs. Here's how this scenario could work:

Right now Visualize markets its products using a direct sales force and business partners. But, as some of its products are listed in UDDI directories, applications will seek out Visualize services and some day negotiate how to pay for those services. When this happens, Visualize will not have to use a direct sales force for missionary sales instead, applications will find Visualize products and determine whether and how they can use them. Fewer direct sales representatives would be required to "push" Visualize products to market.