A recent survey of ISVs carried out by Inishtech show that over 95% of the participants interviewed plan to implement Subscription Based Billing for their applications. Just over 70% plan to also include some form of Usage Based Billing as part of their subscription model.

The majority of ISVs surveyed currently deploy their applications on premise or with dedicated hosting for their clients. Their applications are typically deployed on Desktops or Servers and many are Web Based. All those surveyed have plans to have cloud based offerings for their application with an even split between those saying that they will have separate products for Cloud and On Premise deployment versus those with a single application. Interestingly, less than 50% forecast said that they would provide a single tenant SaaS offering.

On the question of licensing Cloud Based applications and controlling Tenant Entitlements to different feature sets, over 75% considered this to be very important to their business while a similar number stated that they would require the same licensing and execution management and control for both their On Premise and Cloud based application.

The results show a clear move towards Cloud Deployment across the board. Even ISVs with traditional Desktop and Server based applications are looking at ways to exploit the Cloud opportunity either with Hybrid versions of their products or new SaaS offerings.

One key finding is that those companies with a background of dealing with Desktop and Server deployment consider licensing as a key element of their move to the Cloud and plan to use the same licensing and entitlement management approach for both their legacy applications and their new Cloud offerings.