OMS Solutions for Enterprise Software Publishers
The enterprise software publisher is usually a large company with a number of divisions and/or product lines. Software is their primary business and often they have embedded and OEM products that they offer. The enterprise software company is likely to have alternate or secondary channel partners which while they may deliver the initial product delivery (IPD) in either physical or electronic format, the enterprise software publisher is most likely in charge of all service and support issues related to their products.
Primary Challenges
- Multi-Channel Delivery
Having multiple delivery channels provides both logistical and management challenges. In many cases the end users of your products are customers of another company and this can make it diifcult to service and support these users as well as to market to them directly.
- Multi-Division or Product Lines
Most enterprise software publishers have grown through mergers and acquisition and while alot of marketing money is usually spent creating a single brand image, making it look like a single company to the outside world, internally divisions or groups generally are left to work independently through different "we are unique or have special considerations" processes. This generally causes overlaps, reduces quality and erodes profits by not taking advantage of size (scales of economy, cross selling and shared resources).
- IP Protection
Intellectual property is the primary revenue generator and as such its protection is paramount. IP needs to be protected through execution control (licensing) and distribution control (entitlement) otherwise revenue will be lost through fraud, abuse and misunderstanding.
- Large Customer Base
Two areas are impacted, the first is customer support and the second is marketing. With a large customer base comes the challenges of providing outstanding customer service, scale being one of the most prominent challenges. For marketing, a large customer base presents the critical challenge to leverage it since an enterprise software comapny usually has multiple products you don't want to leave rocks unturned.
- Export Compliance and Restriction Enforcement
A critical element related to the electronic delivery of materials is to ensure full audit and tracking capabilities and the ability to dynamically and continually enforce compliance or restrictions related to the materials.
- Finished Goods Complexity
In many cases due to the complexity of the intellectual property (including embedded, shared and OEM products), quality and maintability can be positively impacted by a standard worflow process and toolset during the release management process.
- Reporting/Archiving
Provide global reporting, performance monitoring and statistics for customer service and compliance purposes.
Solutions
OMS offers three solution levels to the enterprise software publishing industry. The first level, DPM offers a framework and workflow management process to collect and manage finished goods production. The second level, ESD provides technology and a framework to electronically distribute the EDA materials to your customers, it adds the ability for your customer to self-service for both IPD and updates. The third level provides the technology, framework and services to better support and market to your customers while providing the self-service portal.
Release Management
This solution is focused on streamlining the release management process via a collaborative, revision controlled workflow managed central repository. It allows various teams to interact while producing the finished goods. It provides a central repository for all the finished goods deliverables from release notes, to documents to software files. It allows a product structure, content and metadata to be bound together and eventually locked once a product is released.
This solution can reduce pipeline trubulence and surprise as finished goods progress through the states of draft, review, test and release, actual dates can be compared to original estimates. When a target is missed those interested parties can be notified.
Keeping all the structure, content and metadata is a single repository allows shared materials to be easily included in other products. A product can not be released until all of its components are ready to be released. Safeguards can be put into place to ensure individual products can be controlled by different groups but the same process is used by all groups.
Electronic Software Distribution (ESD) and Electronic License Management
With this solution the ConnectNow is leveraged to provide not only download but also optionally installation (ISM) and update (USM) services. This solution also provides a framework to allow you to create and operate a self-service portal, where customers can view all their entitlements (base products, updates, documentation and licenses). The entitlement center can be customized to allow the customer to view orders and his licenses and/or subscriptions and be integrated with your eCommerce site to allow renewal of subscriptions/licenses to be reflected immediately upon approval.
ESD allows you to proactively notify users of their updates and select the deliverables they want or need. It provides a workflow environment which allows engineers to build the finished goods and for all deliverables to be revision-controlled and approved increasing quality controls and streamlining the release process. It allows gaming companies to reduce the burst updating requirements by separating the game server and download servers onto different independent platforms. You can segment new feature use to selected groups of users.
ELM empowers users to self-service themselves on licensing issues. Group administration and active data management allow administrators to track usage and link end users, license and configurations. It allows your customers to leverage their investment in your products and reduce accidentally abuse.
When combined with our DVECS compliance and restriction services, just-in-time security checks can be enforced at download time, whether it is initial, paused or scheduled activity. This can limit your exposure to fraud and piracy by creating and maintaining blacklists.
Customer Relationship Management
Our CRM solution allows you to add more services and technology to analyze and act on consumer information for marketing and customer support functions. Create a marketing campaign or create a custom list of those customers running a certain hardware device or operating system level; even target customers who have your product A installed but not your product B.
ESD when combined with advanced ConnectNow functionality like Installation Services Manager and Update Service Manager to target and display customer activity, visible to both the customer and your support teams.
Get to know and understand your customers and markets one customer at a time or through segmentation. Review and find your opportunities and threats with data that can be openly shared through integration points with your existing business infrastructure.
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