Modernizing an application to take advantage of
cloud-native architectures and services is complex,
requiring expertise in cloud technologies, processes
and tools. Here's how to get started.
Over the past few years, there has been a significant shift in the business model for
independent software vendors (ISVs). Traditionally, buying software involved a high,
one-time purchase cost for a solution that the customer then installed on their local
computer or data center. Incremental software updates were typically included in the
initial purchase price, but when major releases were announced, the customer would
either pay an upgrade cost or stay with the existing product. This was the norm for pur-
chasing everything from Microsoft Office to products offered by smaller, niche software
houses.
Times have changed, and now the subscription model has become the norm, with soft-
ware as a service (SaaS) products satisfying customer needs. The driving force behind
this change has been the cloud, where customers are now accustomed to paying
monthly for software access.
By moving their hosting to the cloud, software providers’ costs can be invoiced monthly
too. This allows ISVs to not only directly map a customer’s monthly charges to their uti-
lization, but also eliminates the costs associated with provisioning additional data center
servers and storage to meet a customer’s increased demand. As a result, ISVs who have
moved to the public cloud can offer lower-cost, hosted solutions. And this also opens the
door to smaller customers who do not possess the internal infrastructure needed to run
the software.
ISVs who decide to fully embrace the cloud are after all the advantages that can be real-
ized by moving both their software development teams and software products to the
cloud, including:
• Lower cost, hosted offerings for customers
• Improved application performance and customer satisfaction
• Enhanced application agility, scalability and maintainability
• Secure, developer-ready cloud environments to accelerate innovation
• Increased developer productivity through the use of cloud-native architectures
and services
SPRING 2019 | THE DOPPLER | 39