Packaging Your IP for Differentiation, Part 6: Packaging 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

In part 5, we looked at the importance of selecting the right feature set for the target audience by customer scenario. Here, we look at how to approach packaging your IP to various audiences.

Depending on the form of product your IP will take, there are different considerations for its packaging. Below are considerations for three forms.

Software as your IP

Your IP may come from software your company has written for clients that was needed to fill a gap ...