|
As more customers become familiar with the concept of an “app store” in their personal lives many of them are starting to ask solution providers to provide a similar type capability for their corporation.
Like most things IT, that’s a lot easier said than done. But Michael Ni, chief marketing officer for Avangate, a provider of an e-commerce service platform, says solution providers will need to start setting up their own app stores. Between the rise of mobile computing and the fact that many companies don’t know how they might want to acquire and pay for a particular piece of software, flexibility when it comes to software licensing models has become a critical customer requirement, says Ni.
There’s no doubt that the way corporate software is consumed is being transformed. Influenced by the success of mobile computing applications, corporations are asking vendors to deliver applications in a modular way. Rather than having to download and install a monolithic application, they want to be able to easily access a core piece of software that can then be extended via the addition of any number of modules.
That obviously adds complexity to the licensing process. But customers are also wary of loading software that consumes processing resources even though nobody is using a particular piece of functionality that the vendor thought someone might need on day. They are also painfully aware that the more software there is to install, the more likely there is to be a security vulnerability that needs to be addressed.
In addition, customers are not sure how they want to pay for software going forward. Many of them are interested in cloud computing as way to shift to reduce capital budget requirements. With that shift many of them are also investigating the possibility of make more use of usage-based licensing models.
|
