Microsoft Azure Cloud Services for ISVs

As an Independent software vendor (ISV), you focus on developing and selling both consumer and enterprise software products. Wider software distribution means a larger customer base and hence greater revenue.

One of the best ways to do so is to move your applications to the cloud. As a result, both startups and established ISVs adopt the SaaS model to scale up their services as per the customers’ needs and ensure higher revenue.

With on-site to cloud migration, ISVs can focus on core business areas, speed up agile DevOps cycles, and improve the user experience.

How ISVs Can Work More Effectively with Public Cloud Vendors

Public cloud vendors have a vast range of resources to help ISVs build a flexible and scalable solution that can be optimized to meet the demand of their customers. Some of the popular public cloud vendors include AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

ISVs can get extra support from cloud vendors in terms of technical platform support, product visibility, cost optimization support, and more. In addition, public cloud vendors like Azure provide multiple services for moving to the cloud, whether IaaS, PaaS, or SaaS.

Public cloud vendors further help ISVs in terms of sales and revenue strategies to increase their customer base significantly. There are two main ways for ISVs to get support from public cloud vendors.

Becoming A Long-Term Customer
To get the maximum benefit, some ISVs decide to remain long-term customers of the public cloud vendor. You must invest additional money to get support in different areas like design and architecture. Without that, you will receive technical support like any other customer.
Becoming A Partner
ISVs can have long-term partnerships with public cloud vendors. Partnering with public cloud vendors gives you access to technologies for improving your software, giving it more visibility in newer markets, enhancing customer satisfaction, and more.

Cloud vendors have different management strategies for different types of ISVs depending on competency factors like their size, potential, and more. ISVs can also choose a program and tier of their choice.

Business Values that ISVs Can Drive Through Microsoft Azure

One of the public cloud service providers, which is quite popular among ISVs, is Microsoft Azure. Azure is helping ISVs cut operational costs and ensuring faster time to market for their offerings. In addition, Microsoft Azure is commissioning ISVs around the world and helping them increase their customer base.

Other benefits of choosing Microsoft Azure as your cloud partner are lower customer acquisition costs and better customer retention opportunities.

How Can ISVs Meet the Increasing Customer Expectations with Azure

Sometimes, people view the cloud as simply a hosting solution. However, choosing the right cloud platform is crucial for ISVs to meet their customers’ evolving demands and ensure future success.

Choosing Azure ensures improved security, reliability, intelligence, and efficiency in software development and delivery to end customers. In addition, Azure provides the following benefits that help in meeting customer expectations.

Cost optimization
Azure allows ISVs to track expenses category-wise as well as have an overall record. This way, you can plan your budget and launch more projects. As a result, you can spend more in terms of resources and staff for the main project and have a faster time to market.
Flexible deployment
Azure provides more options to customers with its flexible plans. Azure cloud works as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model to pay for the resources as you go. But it provides support for a hybrid environment too, where customers can integrate on-premises software. In addition, it offers PaaS capabilities for storage, networking, and machines.
Latest technologies
To stay competitive in the market, you should provide customers with innovative software solutions that incorporate the latest technologies. Azure can support such goals by enabling you to create applications backed by technologies like artificial intelligence and data analytics on its platform.
Integration services
Azure supports API and integration with thousands of third-party apps besides Microsoft applications. Azure also integrates tools, templates, and managed services that make it possible to easily build and manage any kind of software application- mobile, web, and Internet of Things (IoT), and more.

This helps provide a holistic solution so that they do not have to shuffle between applications. This saves time for customers and improves satisfaction.
No infrastructure burden
ISVs do not need to manage complex hardware and software infrastructure for setting up Azure cloud. Instead, everything is taken care of by Microsoft. Still, they have complete control over their applications, and all the processes are transparent. This ensures that you focus on building software that meets the experience of your customers.

5 Ways ISVs are Accelerating Application Development with Azure

Azure offers several features that help them accelerate their application development process. Key factors which help ISVs develop innovative applications are:

Azure DevOps for Agile Project Methodology
Most ISVs opt for agile software development methodology to launch their software in the market successfully. Implementing the Azure DevOps platform helps with the features’ development, testing, maintenance, and control to ensure faster time to market for new applications and post-launch updates.

Microsoft Azure does this through automation of repetitive processes, which also lowers the risk of manual errors and accelerates production cycles. Hence, the code deployments become faster.
Scalability
Applications developed and hosted on Azure Cloud can scale efficiently without spending extra time writing the code for scaling. In addition, azure storage can scale as per your business requirements, and you can get additional hold as your customers increase.

Even if an Azure region goes down, which is rare, Microsoft will make the backups available to ISVs. The data is secure and can be easily recovered in case of disastrous events.

You can also change the number of processors and other resources required in a few clicks. With the pay-as-you-go model, ISVs only pay for the storage space and processing time as per their need.
Innovation
Most ISVs are integrating technologies like AI and machine learning (ML) into their applications. But with Azure, even if you do not have experts to train and optimize AI models, you can still build cutting-edge solutions.

You can quickly build secure and responsible ML models with Azure. This makes it suitable to develop applications related to image processing, speech or natural language processing (NLP), chatbots, data analytics, and more. The work of developers also gets reduced.
Faster deployment and testing
Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) provides enterprise-grade security and governance to build and deliver scalable applications. Given that most developers use GitHub for their open-source projects, review versions of pull requests (PRs) get deployed to the sandbox environment for testing and making changes in the Git version.

This ensures that senior members on the project can easily check if merging the branch will have conflicts or negatively impact application performance. So, the necessary changes that have a positive influence can be approved quickly.
Maintenance by Microsoft
ISVs have to ensure that the data of their customers is kept safe. ISVs are prone to cyberattacks due to the storage of sensitive data of their users that can be used for malicious purposes. But with Microsoft Azure, ISVs do not have to worry about the security and governance themselves as Microsoft has decades of experience in ensuring data privacy.

Azure Security Center can scan and detect vulnerabilities. It can also give recommendations to address specific issues and comply with best security practices. It can also discover AKS clusters and detect threats based on the cluster and host analytics.

Microsoft also provides role-based access control within an organization. For example, Azure Rights Management (RMS) protects the entire ecosystem containing the suite of applications like Office 365. It uses encryption, identity, and access management tools to ensure safety.

Conclusion

Many growing ISVs that work for different sectors have joined Azure for creating innovative and powerful software solutions. Apart from offering cost-effective cloud services than its peers while providing several capabilities, Microsoft Azure Cloud offers several advantages that make it the best choice for ISVs.