By John Smith
The term “ease-of-use” has been thrown around in the enterprise software market for years. It generally referred to UIs that were reasonably intuitive, as well as deployment facilitated by sundry prompts, menus and “wizards.” The new rules of consumption economics, however, are forcing software vendors to radically re-think ease-of-use—because their revenue will depend on it. And enterprise IT will benefit substantially.
What does “ease-of-use” mean?
In enterprise software, “ease-of-use” requires much more than just a pretty interface or deployment that isn’t excessively demanding on IT professionals. In fact, three attributes clearly distinguish consumption-driven requirements from our historical understanding of ease-of-use:
- Low-service/no-service deployment. Software customers have declining tolerance for obstacles between purchase and benefit. In part, this is because they are increasingly LOB buyers who have neither the skills nor the patience for technical challenges. In part, it is because the expectations of younger customers have been raised by their personal experiences with consumer software. And in part, it is because market leaders have raised the bar when it comes to ease of deployment. Regardless of the particular reasons, in the new consumption-driven market, vendors who don’t meet these reduced tolerances will lose out to those that do.
- Easy discovery and activation of untapped features. While vendors have always encouraged customers to use all the features of their software, they have not had the strongest economic incentives to do so. With consumption economics, they do—because licensing costs are more granularly tied to feature utilization. So vendors must make it much easier for users to discover untapped features, explore them on a trial basis to understand their value, and then activate them and add them to their licensed entitlements. If any of this takes too much work or is too confusing, both the vendor and the customer will lose out.
- Built-in, high-value content. Enterprise software vendors have traditionally understood content as something you put on your website to support your customers if and when they might look for it—or something you provided to your professional services staffs to ensure their ability to deliver. The new demands of consumption economics, however, are forcing vendors to build content right into their software. This integrated content is necessary to ensure that customers make the best possible use of their software and achieve the best possible results from that use. Vendors must therefore also continually update their content in response to customers’ constantly changing needs.
Are you ready?
These changes in ease-of-use do not just entail incremental improvements to software features and functionality. They instead represent a radical re-architecting of software code and re-structuring of the entire software delivery process.
Not every enterprise software vendor is prepared to make these changes. That’s why consumption economics poses a serious threat to the established order. But those that successfully navigate the disruption will come out on top—and wind up with higher valuations and stronger customer relationships in the process.
John Smith is the General Manager of Infrastructure Management at CA Technologies, Inc.
