Established application providers are moving towards offering their existing on-premise solution as Software as a Service to get higher revenue through accelerated sales cycles, improved closing rates and to lower costs through more cost-effective customer acquisition. Coincidently, the Economic climate has also accelerated the requirement of software as a service (SaaS) as right-sized, ZERO-Capex alternatives to on-premise applications. Customers are also opting for easy-to-use subscription services, which require investment for current usage of service and not future capacity.
Considering the market dynamics, SaaS, now is moving from a stand alone hosted offering to an on-line solution integrated with existing on-premise or other SaaS solutions. These deployments have become part and parcel of the enterprise environment. SaaS companies tend to concentrate more on market coverage & customer acquisition activities to increase their revenues. One such activity is follow-up with customers for Contract Renewals, wherein Contract renewal process is one of the major cash flow options that pumps-in continuous revenue to the service provider. The success secret in SaaS business is, customer is always a prospect. As such, activities like Managing Contracts, Billing and revenue generation has now become more important and complicated for service provider. Developing and maintaining a billing, revenue and customer management solution may not be part of their core business objective, which needs a dedicated internal IT resource to continuously manage and enhance the system , which can rather be used for strengthening their core SaaS offering.
In 2008, we have made architectural changes to the decade old Subscriber Management and Billing System and simultaneously acquired eVapt, Inc. As part of the acquisition process, we have included important feature such as Observer, a usage metering module from eVapt into our world class Customer Management and Billing Solution. eVapt, Inc., is a US-based, wholly-owned subsidiary of MagnaQuest, and enables the metering, billing, subscription management and pay-as-you-use model for Cloud computing, SaaS, On-Demand Content and Mobile VAS service providers.
eVapt is revolutionizing the way Cloud businesses can run and manage billing. In addition to dramatically simplifying a service provider’s billing, payments and subscription management capabilities, eVapt can also offer additional benefits to other parts of a service provider’s organization:
- Marketing: Determine optimal ways to package Cloud Computing offerings into pricing and discount schedules. Build and manage marketing programs around discounts, coupons and customer loyalty.
- Finance and Accounting: Manage contracts, commitments, and mediate the contract terms with actual usage to determine billing and overage fees. Manage the end-to-end billing, payments and collection process.
- Sales: Manage the trial-to-subscription process, up-selling, renewal and customer support process.
- Product Management: Understand the feature sets that are used most often by your customers, and incorporate these findings into product enhancements that will have the biggest impact.
In summary, the eVapt solution provides Cloud Computing providers with “best practices” capabilities in the areas of contract management, billing, mediation and revenue settlement, and will enable service providers to better focus on their core business strength and service delivery capabilities.
