Jay Clemens
Melanie Posey, research vice president of IDC’s hosting and managed network services, has described three factors she believes enterprises should consider before adopting subscription-based software offerings.
Posey wrote in a blog post published Monday that enterprises must conduct audit on the software they are buying to allocate workloads between perpetual license and subscription models.
“There are obvious financial benefits to this approach but being able to quickly increase or decrease software resources to respond to changing business needs can provide a competitive advantage as well,” she wrote.
Posey also urged businesses to examine the licensing terms of software products and find ways to schedule usage between hourly and bring-your-own-license model.
“Development, testing and temporary workloads that tend to ‘burst’ might benefit from an hourly billing model, so that when usage reduces so does the hourly rate,” she wrote.
She said BYOL “might be more appropriate for a long-term project,” for which an enterprise would be able to manage software license for a longer period.
