As the subscription market continues to grow, Cloudmore is well-placed to help companies take advantage of the opportunities it presents for increased revenue and growth. Microsoft CSPs, IT service providers, ISVs, telcos, and software distributors can all benefit from using the Cloudmore platform to provide or use subscription products.
We talked to Cloudmore CCO, Mark Adams, to find out more.
To profitably turn your products and offers into subscriptions, you need the technology layer in the middle. It needs to fit in with your existing technology stack and enable you to process your subscriptions, ensure that your billing is robust, and allow you to provide a good customer self-service experience. This is precisely what Cloudmore does.
Ultimately, good subscription management leads to a good cloud commerce experience. It allows companies to put their full catalog into a solution, which then can effectively deal with all the necessary subscription metadata.
The very nature of subscriptions means that they can change dynamically, and both suppliers and customers need the ability to make changes and to understand either their sales and billing or their purchasing. Whether you're a service provider, a central IT function, or an end-user, that self-service experience is vital.
The final piece is the reporting functionality - whether that's having a strong and detailed audit trail or having access to the high-level intelligence that lets you understand what’s going on in your business. Cloudmore allows companies to see who did what, what was the change made at the subscription level, or the user level, or the plan level. Cloudmore delivers value across all those components – and it’s the subscription management part of it that delivers on this. It can avoid days and days of work in understanding what was billed, to whom, and when.
We often have companies come to us thinking that they have a billing problem. But if they’re not managing their service catalog in a platform, and employees are making unlogged changes all over the place, then there’s no billing event associated with those changes. It’s here that the billing problem starts because they can't instantly tell a customer why the bill is what it is. So, while they think they have billing issues, it is really a subscription management issue. Without effective subscription management, these billing problems will persist.
We have completeness of vision. There are platform providers that will solve the distributor or vendor’s problems, but they won't necessarily be thinking about the next part of the supply chain. They're not thinking about the vendor or the end customer. Cloudmore can execute across all parts of the supply chain.
Additionally, every interaction we have with a customer becomes a learning opportunity – a chance for us to improve our solution. And because we deliver the platform in a multi-tenanted way, we can make regular updates to the platform, which deliver improvements for all our customers. This means our platform is getting better all the time.
I also think we see many applications for our technology. We're happy to talk to all sorts of different verticals. While some of those customers are currently in early-stage maturity, we see the potential they have and know we can help with future vertical solutions.
And finally, we have a long-term vision of the B2B ecosystem of subscriptions. If you think about the way businesses buy, they might go to a preferred supplier, or they’ll get a referral, or they’ll do an internet search. But none of these approaches really gives them the information they need. If you were to put all this into an ecosystem where you can compare and contrast the performance of customers of your size, or those in your sector who are buying in the same way that you do, this will deliver a different, but far more valuable supply chain than we have right now.
We are laser-focused on delivering that commerce experience. We want to allow all businesses to operate on a level playing field. No matter their size or location, they should be able to access the solutions they need, using a commercial model that suits them. The move towards subscriptions is being driven as much by the buyers as it is by the sellers. And it’s happening now.
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