Packaging Your IP for Differentiation, Part 2: Identifying your company expertise for packaging IP

Cloud computing brings immense benefits to customers by shifting the burden and risk of building, operating and owning the data center to cloud services providers and effectively turning IT into a pay-per-use utility. However, when IT becomes a utility, technology reselling partners are financially impacted by an ever improving self-service model, subscription pricing and the need to differentiate when their competitors are effectively offering the same utility. In this seven part series we look at how partners can package their own intellectual property (IP) assets to effectively differentiate and regain revenue lost to the cloud model.

• Part 1: Dealing with the cloud's disruption to the partner business model
• Part 2: Identifying your company expertise for packaging IP
• Part 3: Identifying your IP assets
• Part 4: Establishing the business case for packaging your IP
• Part 5: Defining customer scenarios for your packaged IP
• Part 6: Packaging your IP assets
• Part 7: Pricing your IP assets

Why packaged IP?

Firstly, your IP, when packaged as a sellable product, is a point of differentiation in the market that no-one can take away. Unlike third party vendors' products and services, your company owns its IP and there ought to be nothing identical offered by others. Its value to customers should be measurable and help your company be positioned more strategically with them.

Secondly, your company has control over its IP. Control over who sells it, delivers it, how its priced, and how it evolves. And you are not at the mercy of other vendors to make those decisions for you.

Thirdly, it can be a source of additional services and products sales. If ...