eVapt Corporate Blog

“Pick what you want” is the mantra that made cloud service providers to stay ahead in the competitive cloud arena. The “On-demand” services offered by cloud service providers are now more dynamically availed by customers. Based on the usage analytics, cloud service providers have to offer new exciting plans to keep customer happy and to get competitive advantage. To meet such requirements of the market dynamics, cloud service providers have to come-up with new promising plans that enhances customer stickiness, sign-up for long term contracts and engages them to avail services continuously.

Service providers are more competitive in offering modular packages such as Bronze, Gold, Platinum with additional services topping on the higher packages and Pay as you go services in order to suffice the market requirement. Though services are offered across the globe, they should support local currencies or a single standard currency.

Service provider system should have the option to scale up and scale down the services with respect to the market. Flexible service plans such as region and customer specific packages, dynamic pricing, lower monthly fixed plus usage based charges, long term contracts exclude or include different tax rates and support based services are few important factors which enhances the customer acquisition rate.

A service provider system should be flexible enough to allow customer to avail the service, even after exceeding the usage limit and charge them on the overages rather than terminating the service. This results in less efforts in customer retention process and more concentration of customer acquisition .

Some more scenarios where service provider’s system should support.

• Automates in changing the customer package on a future date.
• Override the existing price and define a new price for the same price plan.

Billing, Cloud computing, Pricing, SaaS, SaaS Monetization, Saas pricing

We have seen a significant increase in cloud solution adaption during the financial crises period. Customers / users are now more cautious in evaluating the cloud solutions. In addition to the adaptability, user friendly and scalable criteria, organizations are now more concerned about any third party system’s capability in interacting with the existing solutions in the eco-system. Where as the eco-system may have few home grown solutions, standalone applications, third party systems, back office solutions etc.,

Opting a cloud business application affects all the areas of an organization, from sales & marketing, technical, operational and till customer support. An integrated cloud system should ensure that there is no redundancy in data, yet without compromising on its security. So System should have a flexible architecture which ensures integration with external systems and internal systems of the organization. And the overall system should be tightly integrated resulting in enriching the value of their offerings through the synergy of functionality brought together on these platforms.

Though there are good number solution providers aware of this fact, still few of the solutions offered to Cloud Business are not fully geared up in delivering these promises or expectations to their customers.

Cloud computing, Economy, SaaS

As we all are familiar that, Customer acquisition is one of the important phases in the business process. There are certain best practices to increase the customer acquisition rate and reduce churn. Streamlining customer acquisition process will boost the sales of any cloud service provider.

1. Trial Sign-up Process:

Cloud computing enabled users or end customers with Try & Buy model which gives an option to sign up for a Trial period, evaluate and go for commercial contract. Cloud service provider should have a system in place which allows them to define a trial plan and activate their access. The system should automate the life-cycle of a Trial User such as trial plan activation, providing limited/controlled access to the service, deactivation of the trial services based on the trail period expiration.

2. Effective follow-up :

Cloud service provider should communicate to its Trial Users effectively in advance to convert them into Paid Users . Sending regular communications will help in keeping the trial users in engage and explore to the additional & attractive services by opting for the paid subscription which will result in maximizing the cloud service provider’s revenue.

Cloud service provider should have a system which provide the list of Trial Users whose access is about to expire . System should send regular communication on the account expiry date and other promotional service offerings.

3. Contract sign-up & tailor made plans

It is very challenging activity for cloud service provider to sign-up a commercial contract with its customers. In addition to the plans or packages offered by cloud service provider, customers will have their own plans, service requirement and contract terms during contract negotiation. Cloud service provider should meet their customer requirements by singing up tailor made contract. Cloud service provider system should be able to define flexible service packages, plans, pricing & contract terms.

Cloud Service providers should provide customers, the choice to utilize their preferred services. Which not only reduces the churn rate substantially but also retains high value and profitable customers. With this, service provider can experience increase in overall organization profitability. Cloud service providers should have a Business Support System and Monetization platform, which streamlines the above discussed customer acquisition process.

eVapt, a customer management, metering & billing solution for Cloud computing, SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, and On-Demand businesses. This billing and monetization platform available on-demand and enables service providers to both automate their back office operations, as well as support more sophisticated pricing and billing models. eVapt is revolutionizing the way Cloud businesses can run and manage billing. In addition to dramatically simplifying a service provider’s billing, payments and subscription management capabilities, eVapt can also offer additional benefits to other parts of a service provider’s organization such as Marketing, Finance & Accounting, Sales.

Cloud computing

Slowdown has created business needs for high level optimizations, for generating more output with lesser inputs & best utilization of existing resources(capital, assets & skills). Inventing innovative methods of selling products or simply repackaging solutions and services to combat slowdown opens a window of opportunity for existing players. For instance, small operators in telecom & pay media industry can opt for co-sharing resources, saving on huge capital investments. Similarly, Enterprise software solution providers, started offering their solution on hosted multi-tenancy model. Today, there are ample opportunities for Infrastructure sharing (passive infrastructure), subscribing to hosted applications & even outsourcing non-core functions. Another aspect is establishing long term, meaningful partnerships in business with vendors, suppliers & customers. When economy is in recession, every business has to go through almost similar challenges. When the ecosystem is strong & synergised, the impact is lesser.

Though SaaS and On-Demand model allowed operators to manage the downturn with no Capex and lower Opex, but now its time for solution providers to concentrate on improved quality and further value add offering. Otherwise, competition may take extra edge and Operators / Users may again go back to enterprise solutions, by leaving SaaS as stopgap arrangement.

The key is to win relationships with quality service delivery and not just contracts.

SaaS SaaS, SaaS Transition