Software's Clear and Present Danger

Declining maintenance revenues are threatening the livelihood of many software vendors. ISVs can protect their maintenance revenue stream - and even grow it - by becoming more customer centric.

By Chris Dowse, Neochange

Long the software industry's cash cow, maintenance and support revenue provides high margins that are the funding engine for new product research and development. The maintenance revenue stream is also used as a basis for company valuations in mergers and acquisitions and financing arrangements. Protecting maintenance revenue is a hot topic for independent software vendors (ISVs); a 2006 Neochange article on the subject had over 3,000 downloads.

Software vendors must act now to improve customer relations and improve effective user adoption in order to maintain - and even continue to grow - maintenance revenues in the future.

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Is SOA Really “Dead”?

The latest flame wars on SOA prompted Tony Baer to take a look at the basis for the arguments and question the need for another governance silo in this post to the SandHill.com Blog on SOA.

Mobile Money Madness

Guy Smith of Silicon Strategies Marketing says there are three markets where making order from mobile chaos is proving profitable: mobile web application platforms, mobile application testing, and mobile analytics. In other words making apps, testing apps, monetizing apps. Read why in this post to his SandHill.com Blog.

Publish Your Perspective!

SandHill.com wants your opinions. Send your thoughts on the enterprise software industry to SandHill.com editor, Maryann Jones Thompson (maryann@sandhill.com) and have your opinions published on our site.

Rethinking High-tech Distribution

Distributors may hold the key to high-tech sales growth in many markets. Understand the impact on vendors in this feature from The McKinsey Quarterly.

News Update: Leadership Studies

CEOs step up, down and aside; plus, Satyam's fallout, megavendor's layoffs, Google's reseller program and Salesforce.com's Service Cloud. Read these stories and more software news of the week in the latest SandHill.com Software News Summary.

Poll: Maintenance Revenue RIP?

Are the heady days of lucrative maintenance revenue streams over for ISVs?
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Last month, readers speculated as to how slow the SaaS slowdown will be.
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More at SandHill.com:

Read the most important enterprise software industry news of the week >>

Monitor the latest software venture capital deals >>

Size up last week’s software M&A deals >>

See who’s made it to the top in our list of recent software executive appointments.

Send us your feedback on this newsletter and the SandHill.com site.

Parting Thought

“Failure defeats losers, failure inspires winners.”
— Robert T. Kiyosaki

Courtesy of Malcolm Kusher, The Kushner Group

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SandHill.com is published by Sand Hill Group, which provides investment and management advice to emerging leaders in the $600 billion enterprise software, services and solutions market. Sand Hill Group produces the Software and the Enterprise series of conferences for industry executives, and authors research reports on cutting-edge technology topics.