So you are an ISV with a niche market - perhaps you run software for Estate Agents, Property Developers or Charities. You have standard software, perhaps for Workflow or Content Management and charge professional services for the "tweaks" for certain industry verticals. Over time you have a great and loyal customer base and a great relationship with your OEM. You're a Microsoft Gold Partner and you have great in-house development skills. You have a SaaS offering too, a subscription service that you sell through an automated system.

How though do you get to the next level and really get the most from your customers? How do you sell more and take advantage of these long term relationships without investing heavily in new products, sales and services?

If you're a FTSE 250 or Fortune Company you could turn to the VC community or a Bank.....ahh but there's a credit crunch and you can't raise the cash or demonstrate a return quickly enough for them to invest, with no proven track record and no market intelligence.

In the meantime, because the other SaaS providers, your competition, are on the rise, you could find your offering is eroded and you start to experience customer churn because there is no "lock-in" to you as a provider.

So, SaaS has actually started to hurt you as opposed to help you.

But you do have a hope, you can become a Managed Service Provider (MSP) to your account base – so long as you buy these services as you go and you can brand them as yours. In fact if you worked with a company that excels in IaaS this could be a dream combination. You could then create a new revenue stream, in line with your customers, based on zero investment from you.

You can then prove an annuity model and perhaps go to the money men and with great pleasure say "I told you so...." when you IPO and retire a wealthy team of managers.

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