No-headache affordable electronic software distribution (ESD)
by Gordon Graham, Editor, SoftwareCEO
Most people in the software biz are familiar with the advantages of electronic software distribution (ESD) over shipping out CDs.<
We've written about this before.
To recap, ESD lowers costs, saves time, streamlines distribution, and makes for happier customers. It can even help you to recognize revenues sooner.
With benefits like that, who wouldn't want ESD now?
What stops some ISVs may be the headaches of setting up your own FTP site, keeping track of what all your customers are entitled to, answering support calls about downloads that didn't work, and dedicating someone to all these chores.
Or you could outsource the whole shebang. Now there's a new ESD service aimed at small- and medium-sized ISVs called EntitleNow! SMB from OMS SafeHarbor in Lowell, Mass.
This hosted service promises to take away all the trouble of handling your own ESD, for a cost starting at $60,000 a year. That's about the loaded cost of an admin who could handle all of this in-house. Maybe.
OMS SafeHarbor was founded in 2000 by a group of partners with many years of experience in software distribution, says TJ Caveney, the firm's VP sales and marketing.
With the payouts from some successful ventures behind them, he says, "we had the luxury in 2000 to lock ourselves in a room and pay good money to architect and develop the solution we're out selling now."
Billing themselves as "the software delivery experts," they sold their enterprise-scale ESD system to companies like Cadence Design Systems, EMC, Hitachi Data Systems, and IBM.
This year, they decided to bring it to smaller firms.
"We want to make this solution affordable to the middle market, the couple thousand software companies that are doing ESD now, or want to do it better, or haven't done it yet," he says.
"We really want to give these companies the expertise that we've given to these multi-billion companies. And we'll host the solution, so they really don't have to do anything."
To get started with EntitleNow! SMB, an ISV needs to provide:
- a list of customers and their e-mails
- distribution versions of all products
- a set of license keys
- what each customer is entitled to, validated by something like a sales order or maintenance contract.
OMS SafeHarbor does the rest, loading the customer list and products into their ESD system, and working with whatever license system an ISV chooses (home-grown or commercial).
The company sets up a site for customers, notifies them when there's updates, and sends back tidy reports of who downloaded what. They even handle all the support calls for any download issues.
For the entry-level price, you don't get any customization or integration; OMS can do that for an added fee. But you do get the very same infrastructure, network, and management as the biggest customers of OMS.
EntitleNow! SMB also offers optional e-commerce if you need to take orders over the web.
The bottom line?
"We save small and medium businesses time and money, and reduce the need to make long-term investments to gain the benefits associated with electronic delivery," says Caveney.
If you're thinking about moving to, or upgrading your ESD, this is an option that's worth considering.
Copyright (c) 2008, Computing Technology Industry Association, Inc. Reprinted with permission.
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