Hardware and Software technology providers face a common issue: How to further monetize their existing customer base and increase competitive differentiation in order to grow profitability and market share.
Many companies approach this with a "razors and razor-blades" strategy by aggregating and distributing their partners' complementary services, their own subscription/usage-based services, and/or 3rd party developers' add-on offerings to up-sell to their existing customers. But typically they face a myriad of challenges around how to extend their existing infrastructure and operations to support a cloud-based delivery model:
- Providing self-service ordering and provisioning for their customers.
- Enabling multi-tiered and global distribution via existing and new channel partners.
- Automating billing for usage or subscription-based products and services.
- Integrating with existing internal services including ERP, CRM, order management and others.
- Royalty and payment reconciliation to content providers and channels.
- Supporting multiple currencies, languages and time-zones.
This provides tremendous benefits including:
- Increase customer retention and profitability.
- Reduce cost of sales, royalty management and 3rd party provider settlement.
- Drive new revenue streams leveraging a cloud-based business and delivery model.
- Grow partner loyalty and sell-through revenues globally.
- Streamline sales operations and channel enablement.
As an example, one of our customers is a large electronics manufacturer who has created a “develop, deploy and distribute” application development and delivery ecosystem that distributes third-party apps to their customers. By enabling developers to develop, certify and distribute apps across a wide variety of device APIs and SDKs, their customers are able to access a growing catalog of innovative apps, while driving a differentiated user experience by enabling a rich development and distribution ecosystem.
If this seems relevant to your company's situation, then you may find the following white paper to be useful: DevOps to AppStore Automation for 3rd Party Developer Ecosystems
We also recorded a webinar last year on this topic, which you can view here: "Application Marketplaces: Enabling and Monetizing the API Economy"