Packaging Your IP for Differentiation, Part 3: Identifying your IP assets

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

Identifying your IP assets

In the past, your staff tailored standard product implementations to customers' specific business needs. These services, when repeated over many projects, became best practices. Chances are that sometimes these services were charged for, often by the hour, and other times they were simply included in the project at no extra cost because it added value to the overall solution. It is also likely that your sales, pre-sales, and professional services staff don't all know what these valuable services are because they may have never been standardized into a product and offered on your price list.

To identify your IP assets, consider the following questions: