USAGE-BASED PRICING MODELS
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Resellers are trusted advisors to their customers, helping them to choose the right services that will enhance efficiency and achieve desired outcomes throughout their business operations.
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models better aligned to the service and value provided than others. Every company needs to decide what is the right model for them from a revenue/risk balancing point of view, the competitive landscape they operate in, and how their customers want to consume/ buy their services. “At the same time, it’s important to recognise that small businesses often exhibit consumer-like tendencies, favouring the adaptability of usage-based models. Conversely, large enterprises typically lean towards traditional licensing and outsourced infrastructure, reflecting their broader scale and specific operational requirements.”
business operations,” he says. “In that sense the role of the reseller, from a vendor’s point of view, is to drive service activation. The role of customisation, configuration and support/ maintenance is slowly fading on a per service basis. The role of the reseller is evolving from technology architecture to business architecture, which is in line with the evolution of the CIO role.” Sage meanwhile provides an expanding range of consumable services that resellers recommend to their customers for achieving operational efficiencies, with deeply integrated accounts payable and micro-financing services just a few examples, Juha says. Increasing popularity Juha expects that usage models will continue to become more popular in the future. “As an industry we are evolving from Software as a Service (SaaS) towards Network as a Service (NaaS),” he says. “There is a trend towards delivering capabilities through micro-services, which through a network model ultimately gets us to agile composable architectures. “Imagine a world where customers can pick and choose the functional capabilities they need, composing solutions to run their business, and paying based on actual usage. We see this trend all around us. People are composing their work life balance through gigging. We compose our entertainment consumption from a wide range of media sources. We home share, ride share, etc, essentially composing our consumption of the services we need to create the lifestyle we want. “
Imagine a world where customers can pick and choose the functional capabilities they need, composing solutions to run their business, and paying based on actual usage. “
A hybrid option is also available. “A common hybrid approach is to have a
baseline subscription and usage-based tier subscriptions,” says Juha. “This gives the customer more predictability over their total cost of ownership and the vendor has better forecast ability over the revenue. There are also levels of usage value abstraction. At the lowest level it’s about data, compute and bandwidth, which leads to cost plus pricing. A higher level of abstraction is transactional pricing that is more aligned to the value of the transaction rather than the cost of providing the service.” Reseller role Resellers have an important role in helping customers to make this transition, Juha adds. “Resellers are trusted advisors to their customers, helping them to choose the right services that will enhance efficiency and achieve desired outcomes throughout their
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