Business Transformation Best Practices: Ten Steps to Optimizing Your Software

Today's global technology marketplace is challenging, competitive, and dynamic. In response to these market conditions, technology vendors are re-thinking their business models and product strategies.

An attractive business transition strategy for intelligent device manufacturers is to move into the software business by becoming more software-centric in how value is delivered and monetized. By delivering more value to your customers in the form of software, your company can increase margins, build competitive differentiation and recurring revenue streams, more precisely target multiple market segments, and dramatically increase customer satisfaction. Cumulatively, these advantages can have a substantial – and even transformational – impact on your company's bottom-line business performance.

So how can your company become more software-centric? How can your company leverage software to drive revenues, efficiency and flexibility? How can it most effectively reap the rewards of software-based revenue streams, while avoiding the risks associated with entering a new business?

Based on our experience helping many of today's leading technology vendors successfully move from an exclusively hardware-based model to one that optimizes software revenues, Flexera Software has developed a practical, proven approach for such a transformation:

1. Socialize and build consensus for the transformation
2. Understand software licensing methodology and its uses
3. Determine appropriate compliance policies and enforcement mechanisms
4. Understand the difference between delivering hard goods and digital goods
5. Understand the software value lifecycle
6. Instrument business processes to support the value lifecycle
7. Implement a customer self-service portal
8. Define and execute a software product management and go-to-market strategy
9. Implement appropriate sales training and compensation policies
10. Report, review, and respond

By following these ten steps, your company can build a thriving software business, even if it has never licensed or monetized software before. And, by doing so, it can more adaptively compete in a global marketplace where customer requirements and expectations are constantly changing – and where rapid responsiveness to those changing requirements and expectations is essential for long-term business growth.

For more information, read the entire paper here: A Practical, Proven Transformation Program for Intelligent Device Manufacturers