Top 3 CEO Reflections On Software 2019/2020
By René van Erk, ISVWorld
At ISVWorld we have had a rollercoaster year ending on a high, we hope yours is ending well too! As the year closes, I am sharing my reflections on 3 areas that stand out when looking back and looking forward.
The Convergence of ISVs and Payments ...
... is evolving: prior to 2019 we saw ISVs signing deals with payment processors to get (significant) revenue share. In 2019 we saw ISVs becoming so-called ISO’s by ‘owning’ payment transactions. That is ending as most ISVs are not equipped to deal with the risks they are exposed to. For 2020 however, we see clients preparing new business models with incremental revenue opportunities for ISVs. BTW, if you haven’t updated your ISVWorld Payment profile to benefit from this, do so here. Or contact us if you want to learn more.
The Tech Distributors revival ...
... is in full motion: not only are they key to the success of the large platform vendors and large ISVs, their reach will create 2020 channel opportunities for small and midsize ISVs as well. Hence, 2019 did not bring the disintermediation others expected. This revival is linked to interesting acquisition activity: Ingram was rumored to be sold again in August, Techdata was sold in November to Apollo, SoftwareOne acquired Comparex and Rightcloud in February, SamSentry in April and BNW for SAP migrations in November. Finally, Insight bought PCM. Wow ...
The next (final ??) Cloud wave has started:
IBM & Red Hat driving Hybrid Cloud, Microsoft pushing their on-premise ERP installed base online, application integrations through APIs and Microservices surging: all the ingredients are there for the next Cloud Migration Wave. Tech Distributors are helping, for example SoftwareOne acquired a share in InterGrupo to drive ISV application migrations. Salesforce/Mulesoft doing its part through their API Community. And Dell Boomi actively driving their IPaas 2.0 vision.
2020 will be another year full of cloud-fun!!
About The Author
René van Erk is currently the CEO of ISVWorld and acts as strategic advisor to many of the top tech companies globally based on over 20 years of operational and M&A experience in software and internet. He worked for eight years in executive roles at Microsoft, mainly in Asia and the US. Prior to that he was part of the initial Open Source Movement at OSF. More recently he led Product and Business development at Wolters Kluwer Europe. René has been involved in over 100 Software M&A transactions.
About ISVWorld
ISVWorld is the largest data-platform globally covering Software Vendor profiles and tracking Software Industry news. ISVWorld helps Tech vendors, Distributors, Investors, Resellers and many more clients creating successful GTM plans when selling to/through ISVs or working with ISVs. Sign up for a trial here.
