Why APS?
The future of business applications is in the cloud. Business customers know it, Service Providers know it, and ISVs know it. As the cloud market continues to grow, you can become an instrumental part of the supply chain for this revolution by delivering your SaaS offering using the Applications Packaging Standard (APS), making your offerings ready for huge new markets via thousands of Hosters and Service Providers ready to accept APS packaged solutions for distribution. APS is the leading packaging standard in this space, and businesses worldwide are getting on board.
This section provides some background on the cloud phenomenon, and talks about how APS can help your business play a part in realizing its profits and benefits.
You can also jump directly to information about your role in the APS-based cloud supply chain:
Distribution in the New World of SaaS
The value of Software as a Service (SaaS) is now well understood in the marketplace. For businesses seeking to simplify their use of critical applications, SaaS shows revolutionary value over traditional models for software delivery and maintenance. But even as the cloud has taken shape, suppliers are always looking for new ways to distribute software that puts less of a burden on their operations and increases their reach through cloud distributors. Complexities and implementation costs, along with remnants of the outmoded on-premises delivery models, have kept some cloud services out of reach, particularly to small and medium business (SMB) customers.
The key value of SaaS over traditional distribution models is the revolutionary way it simplifies a company's software management overhead
In the new world of cloud services, Service Providers seek to automate the purchasing of services in a common way for their full portfolio of SaaS offerings. Self-service portals are the norm, with common single sign-on between the various services a customer may have purchased. Selling SaaS services to the SMB requires a level of software automation and cost management in the provisioning of new accounts that was not required in the 1:1 sale of on-premises software. Reducing the need for human intervention in the full lifecycle of purchase, provisioning, end customer self-administration, billing and service change management is the only way to remain profitable in the online SaaS world, especially when servicing SMBs.
The way ISVs distribute their SaaS offerings and the way Service Providers consume cloud offerings for distribution in this new world requires forethought in how they will support all these challenges.
APS was designed to meet the challenges of this new SaaS distribution world. With APS you have a standard way of automating the machine-to-machine account setup, provisioning, billing and administration of your offerings. Currently, thousands of Service Providers have APS-ready platforms in place, able to accept ISV and SaaS packaged offerings and ready to start selling them to their customer base in a scalable, cost effective manner, with rapid time-to-market.
Without APS, you are required to solve the unique provisioning, billing, and administration with each individual distribution partnership. APS helps ISVs reach the cloud distribution ecosystem via a single packaging effort. Service Providers, meanwhile, can consider hundreds of ISV and SaaS offerings for resale and distribution depending on their own specific go-to-market needs.
Want to know more about packaging? Click here to learn what packaging is from an ISV perspective.
APS does not change the way your offering works. Rather, it simply explains to APS-compatible platforms how to interact with it. It is this level of technical integration that enables new business distribution possibilities, and keeps the ISV business model for distributing cloud offerings completely between the ISV and the distributor.
A New World of Revenue Opportunities
APS leverages the core value of the SaaS model by enabling businesses like yours to dramatically increase profits through participation in a standardized "cloud supply chain" model for developing and supporting cloud-based applications. By standardizing the way cloud-based applications are packaged (provisioned and configured) you can streamline and scale your offerings and operations in the cloud, no matter what part of the supply chain you occupy.
Standards-based application packaging gives Service Providers and ISVs a common strategy for scaling their products across deep and broad markets. APS helps to enable new and better relationships between ISVs and hosting/telecommunications providers that allow businesses throughout the cloud supply chain to realize dramatically greater reach and penetration of their offerings in a cloud-based marketplace.
Are you an ISV? Learn more about the APS business model as it applies to you.
Are you a Service Provider? Learn more about the APS business model as it applies to you.
Engineering a Common Business Vision
As a standards entity tailored to commercial application packaging, APS encourages ISVs and hosting/telecommunications providers to participate in its evolution. This process helps build a community of adopters, as well as an ecosystem of trusted business relationships that mutually benefits all parties. In turn, it fosters an evolution in technology that is both self-fortifying and open to unlimited invention.
This process helps build a community of adopters, as well as an ecosystem of trusted business relationships that mutually benefits all parties
By opting in to APS, businesses become part of a new, exciting community whose members are organized around the world's first standards community for application packaging. Together, these APS adopters will share together in a common business vision: optimizing SaaS as a way to fully leverage their intellectual and financial investments, while also using their diversity of relationships and ideas as a springboard for mutual benefit as all elements of the supply chain innovate together to profit from the cloud.
Who's using APS? Visit the Community page to read about and interact with other APS adopters.
Questions? Contact us if you have a question related to APS or would like to schedule an interview or presentation from the APS Marketing and Business Development Team.
APS Conversations
"The standard is a great opportunity for ISVs. Hosting companies serving small business Customers have enormous reach. We're talking about millions and millions of customers in a ready made channel."Philbert Shih, Analyst - Structure Research
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