ISV Partnership Programs: Who Benefits How from ISV Partnerships

 

 

Part 1: Why would you want to partner with ISVs?

ISVs create products and features that enrich and complement their partners' platforms or products, allowing customers to have end-2-end integrated software solutions

Let’s use ISVWorld’s 4-D partner model to understand why you should partner with ISVs :

- For Revenue Growth
Greater ROI, higher customer retention and conversion rates have all been reported as advantages of ISV integrations. Partner models based on reseller commissions and other reward schemes drive revenue growth for partners.

- For Product Improvement
Leveraging functionality from ISVs by adding that into your own product or platform ensures you can offer the features your customers need while keeping your inhouse development teams focused on improving core functionality that is a differentiator for you - at an accelerated pace.

- For Cost Reductions
Integrating non-core functionality from ISVs into your own product or platform increases the features you can offer to your customers at zero development and maintenance cost

- For Risk Mitigation
Knowledge on certain core technology domains might be expensive to maintain, security for example. In those cases, partnering with an ISV that has security as a core domain, an ISV that has 24/7 security staff actively monitoring might be a better choice for your customers as it mitigates any risk exposure.

 

Part 2: Why and how do ISVs benefit from partnerships?

All ISVs, and in particular SaaS-based ISVs have core products that are built to scale; unfortunately many ISVs lack the ability to scale their organization. And as industries become increasingly more digital, end-users need tech partnerships to enable their business agility and growth, which in turn is where integrated end-2-end ISV solutions come in, more often than not coming from a partnership rather than one organization.

 

- The Revenue Growth benefit

Integrating your software product into a partner ecosystem’s platform creates GTM scalability and hence can accelerate revenue growth. IBM, who ran an ROI/TEI study, even quantifies that, promising potential ISV-partners that integrate their software in the IBM Cloud Paks platform potential business opportunities equivalent to 200% acceleration in revenue growth. Microsoft’s IP Co-Sell program in FY20 was on track to generate 16B$ of partner revenue.

 

- The Risk Mitigation benefit

Don’t aim to reinvent the wheel if a good enough wheel already exists. As an example to illustrate the point, Amazon claims that ISVs building their SaaS on AWS reduce risk of launch failure by 30-50%, reduce development time by 69-77% and reduce time to value by up to 95 percent.

 

- The Product Improvement benefit

Focus your product resources on your core product differentiators only, in-source/partner for generic services like infrastructure, security & more. It will help scaling and help accelerate rollout of new features. An integration platform as a service (iPaaS) will facilitate the necessary app integrations, even between on-premise and cloud platforms.

 

- The Cost Reduction benefit

As per above, cost-reductions can be through risk mitigation and insourcing services. But also in the GTM area, for example ISVs that publish their offers on partner ecosystem online marketplaces experience cost reduction benefits. Microsoft Appsource partner ISVs, for example, saw a 40% drop in cost per lead and a 2x greater conversion rate than industry averages. 

 

Read more about ISV partnerships in our next blog posts from this series, and hop on the ISVWorld Platform to find the right ISVs to partner with.

In case you missed our latest post on tech partnerships:

Getting the most out of ISV Tech Partnerships by clicking on the link or head to the ISVWorld Blog page for more. 


What’s next: 

#2 Amazon Partner Network (APN)
#3 Microsoft Partner Network
#4 Google Cloud Services 
#5 Salesforce Commerce Cloud
#6 Oracle Partners
#7 SAP PartnerEdge
#8 Sage Partners
#9 RedHat Partners
#10 Acumatica the Cloud ERP
#11 Twinfield Partners

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