ISV Partnership
May 2, 2020
Independent Software Vendors, commonly called as ISV partners, are companies that specialize in creating and selling software that could run on multiple hardware or cloud platform. They also try and form integrations with existing products in the market in such a way that they complement each other. The most common example of this is Apple’s App Store – for any sale that happens over here, Apple will get a portion of the revenue.
Why is it important?
Instead of trying to understand why it is important, let’s look at how it is going to benefit customers and companies:
Keeping up with Customer Demand:
Off late, it is evident that the customers have started to choose comfort over loyalty, as opposed to how it was 10 years back. Having an ISV partner in this case will help a company retain customers by providing solutions that originally are not available with what just the product could offer.
More Revenue:
It is a win – win situation for both the partner and the company offering partnership program since in most cases, the partner will get a portion of the profit for every sale made using the partner’s help and when it comes to the company, they get more customers by selling solutions and not just the product itself.
win – win situation for both the partner and the company offering partnership program since in most cases, the partner will get a portion of the profit for every sale made using the partner’s help and when it comes to the company, they get more customers by selling solutions and not just the product itself.
The chart further validates that recurring revenue is the new leading Key Performance Indicator (KPI) for most IT solution providers (a statement supported by the IDC).
Offer solutions in the form of a Suite:
Any customer would rather prefer one vendor who can solve all the customer’s requirement and, in this case, if the company has only one or very few products to provide, they can go for ISV partnerships instead which is the next closest thing to a suite.
But....
There’s a flipside to this too – you, as an ISV partner, will be depending on another company for business.
Take the case of Freshworks – all of the CRM ISV partnerships the company had for Freshdesk were discontinued when their own home grown CRM, Freshsales was released since they become competing companies.
Similarly, Copper’s USP (Unique Selling Point) is that they sit on top of Gmail and in a way, they are a partner to Google. If Google decides to come up with a CRM for all its GSuite customer, Copper has no other way except to pull out.
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Written By - Chameli Kuduva, Founder - SaaS Insider