The “as-a-service” approach to business is gaining more and more traction across many industry sectors. Consumers are developing a preference for subscribing to services as opposed to buying things.
The Internet, Cloud Computing and mobile apps have been high-profile influencers on people’s buying patterns, which have promoted an “as-a-service” mentality. XaaS (anything as a service) is regarded as a new “disruptive” approach to satisfying consumer demand, even though the subscription business model itself has been alive and kicking for centuries in industries such as newspapers, magazines, telephony, insurance and leasing, to name a few.
We are now seeing professional service businesses that traditionally charged by the hour start to charge by fixed subscription instead. This is shown to greatly improve productivity and effectiveness in delivering value to customers. Customers are more inclined to engage and use their subscribed services, rather than hold back to avoid hourly charges. Questions and arguments about billing are significantly reduced. The subscribed model invokes an on-going partnership instead of a series of one-off transactions or interactions.
I.T. businesses that used to sell servers and other hardware items have moved to selling on-line subscriptions to hosting services and have extended their businesses to sell subscribed telephony and data services. They have learned that subscribed business is regular predictable business that they can rely on, so long as they look after their customers. Subscribed business is the best kind of business for the customer and the supplier!
At Datagate, our specialty is enabling service re-sellers to efficiently process, report and bill measurable subscription services, such as telephony, data circuits, hosting, Cloud & mobile apps, electricity, water, gas etc. All of these billing models include a combination of monthly fixed and variable billing. The variable component of the bill is normally derived from a data feed from the supplier of the service that details the service consumption quantities.
I find it interesting that we are encountering many new “as-a-service” businesses that fit Datagate’s fixed and variable subscription model. Some of these are “traditional” as-a-service businesses and others are revolutionary and disruptive approaches to markets formerly served by product or time sales.
At the coal face we see the shift to an “as-a-service” world is very real.
- SaaS – Software as a Service
- TaaS – Telephony as a Service
- IaaS – Infrastructure as a Service
- PaaS – Platform as a Service
- MaaS – Monitoring as a Service
- DBaaS – Database as a Service
- XaaS – Anything as a Service
Mark Loveys 
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