In a recent conversation with a friend who happens to be a CEO of an ISV, he described the difficulties that he has dealing with a multi-channel strategy. Contextually, his ISV sells SAAS/Content, and has been growing, even during the COVID-19 crisis. His team has been eyeing a multi-segment channel strategy, summarized as:
- Marketplaces: Well-known venues like Amazon, Azure Marketplace where he can sell his offering
- B2B: Allows him to service some of his largest partners and corporate customers that are not on marketplaces
- B2C: A channel where individuals can buy his content and software
ISV Multi-Channel Pains
While he stated that all these channels hold huge promise and potential for his business, his problem is that each provides technical challenges and costs, which make it hard for smaller ISVs to scale. “There is absolutely no technical similarity in selling on Amazon or Azure marketplace. Can you imagine servicing different partners?” As an example, if an ISV needed to connect to twenty of its largest customers, point-to-point via APIs would literally mean twenty different integrations. The variety of integrations to marketplaces, which could take months due to technical and compliance complexities, add to the ISV pain. And finally, a B2C strategy requires a totally different set of tools, most of which are irrelevant to the previously mentioned segments.
For all these reasons, smaller ISVs find it difficult to scale and take advantage of the opportunities that the cloud presents to them.
What If …
What if an ISV could connect to a network that contains a quick way to connect to all these different channels? And what if a single point of connectivity were enough and circumvented all these point-to-point headaches?
The Solution: Ecosystem Networks
That is basically what ecosystem networks are supposed to do. Ecosystem networks provide ISVs a seamless way to connect to any channel strategy to avoid all the technical nightmares and costs. Whether they wish to launch a storefront, a B2B channel, or a Marketplace integration strategy, ecosystem networks provide standardization, automation, monetization, and ecosystem-wide insight.
There are two essential types of ecosystem networks that support this:
- Transactional Ecosystem Networks: These ecosystem networks facilitate the transaction, like AppDirect, which provides an ISV the easy ability to distribute through multiple channels with one plug into the network.
- Enablement Ecosystem Networks: This is TIDWIT, which does the same, but rather than focusing on the transaction, it focuses on all the enablement required to manage the journey from marketing to product and sales enablement, to learning and certification, all the way to tech support.
The Future is Now
ISVs no longer have to worry about multi-channel strategies. Rather, they are embracing them by joining ecosystem networks that can help them open a world of opportunities quickly and at an affordable cost. Ecosystem networks are helping them avoid the need for forests of APIs and the IT fires that they light up. They avoid compliance risks. They avoid high, runaway integration costs. With ecosystem networks, connecting business and selling goods and services is quickly getting to a point where it is becoming as easy to connect channels and partners, as it is to connect to the internet.