How to Modernize Your Software Business with Elastic Access

Elastic Access removes barriers to adoption, enables cross-portfolio access, and supports advanced monetization models by allowing you to:

• Sell metered tokens (aka flexible credits), which customers can exchange to access any offering within the portfolio.
• Set prices for each item (application, feature, capability, computation, service, etc.) in a rate table.
• Make immediate pricing and packaging changes by adjusting the rate table.
• Provide real-time, granular usage data to ensure exact charging.

1. Your customer buys an entitlement for a set number of prepaid credits.
2. Credits are immediately available, allowing customers to request items from the rate table, enabling greater control over how your portfolio is accessed.
3. The cost of use is calculated; and tokens deplete accordingly. Charges may either apply on a per-use basis or repeat at a fixed rate over time (such as four tokens per hour).
4. Each charging event is pushed to the data warehouse in real-time. This allows technology companies to produce analytics to illustrate usage patterns, build reports to help customers understand and allocate software spend, and gain actionable data to identify upsell and cross-sell opportunities. Data can also inform product roadmap decisions.
5. Engage in more insightful conversations with your customers at renewal time.

How do you give your customers friction-free access to your premium features? Traditionally this might have been achieved via a premium packaging approach, with top-level grouping of features, and negotiated contracts for smaller numbers of the most expensive packages. Selecting which features belong to what package certainly needs careful thought and planning. The consequence of this complicated approach is often missed upsell opportunities.

Elastic Access simplifies the process of letting customers engage with your premium features. Premium features can be factored into the rate table as add-ons to the main software; their use is charged at the appropriate rate, and easy access enhances the experience. Any number of add-ons can be provided in this way, and giving customers the chance to try before they buy can create productive upsell conversations.

Identify Upsell Opportunities

• Make sure that customers know about your premium products/features.
• Make it easy for customers to access your premium products/features without the need for lengthy negotiations.
• Track usage insights to inform future sales conversations.

SaaS promises the seamless rollout of new capabilities through continuous updates.

Elastic Access supports the seamless rollout of the revenue benefits of SaaS.

With other approaches to software monetization, rigid pricing structures make it difficult to respond to customer requirements. Lack of data also makes it difficult to track how the software is being used. This lack of data centrality prevents the analysis to support agile business decisions.

With Elastic Access, new offerings can be made available to customers quickly. The data it provides about token consumption allows immediate insight into usage and levels of longer-term adoption. This usage data assists with renewals and sales forecasts.

Elastic Access, used for introducing new SaaS offerings:

• Supports rapid delivery of new pricing and packaging options.
• Accelerates time-to-value for customers, with minimal provisioning support from IT or engineering teams.
• Improves renewals forecasting, due to increased visibility into engagement and adoption.
• Facilitates expansion into new markets through increased flexibility, resulting in increased profitability and company valuation.

Six Benefits of Elastic Access

Not knowing how customers are using products, features or services means that the impact of product changes is not known without individual discussions with customers, and opportunities are missed for growth within and beyond your target market.

A long lead time for packaging changes can result in sprawling SKU catalogs in attempts to provide variations, and a long sales cycle as customers wade through the possibilities, trying to find the right thing to meet their business problem.

Most Product Managers need a quick way to see the result of changes made to products, in order to be agile not only in product development but also in its monetization.

Elastic Access provides quick feedback on the way changes made interact with customer preferences – because every consumption event is reflected real-time in the data warehouse.

With the flexibility of Elastic Access rate tables, SKUs can be managed (or simplified if necessary) with little effort.

The ease with which offerings can be added to the rate table allows accelerated speed-to-market, giving a fantastic competitive edge.

Aligning price with value is key for customer satisfaction and customer retention. Revenera’s Dynamic Monetization is built for high volume, rapid usage processing, as needed in many monetization models today. The real-time usage insights aid quick decision-making for rapid price and packaging changes, while also ensuring that costs are optimized for customers. The ability to create detailed usage reports also help producers identify upsell and cross-sell opportunities to grow Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR).

The Elastic Access model reduces friction, removing barriers to adoption that can be common for small and mid-size enterprises, allowing cross-portfolio access to a range of items on an as-needed basis rather than long-term, fixed-rate subscriptions. Customers benefit from instant scalability, streamlined procurement, and the ability to try new offerings without committing to long-term subscriptions.

With multiple benefits for both buyers and suppliers, Elastic Access goes a long way to aligning price with value, improving user experiences and driving long-term retention built on constant innovation.