Packaging Your IP for Differentiation, Part 1: The cloud's disruption to the partner business model

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

The cloud impact on the business model

The stellar growth of cloud computing in recent years is a reflection of the apparent value it brings to end-user companies that want all the benefits of using business applications to automate their operations, while paying only for licenses, bandwidth and capacity they consume at any given time without the burden and risk of building, operating and owning their own data centers.

For ...