ISV Academy

Kick-Off

Microsoft loves Software companies! Join this session to learn why ISVs are considered the main game changers and innovation drivers in tech. Important details about the different sessions of the ISV Academy will be shared, as well as key opportunities and benefits the ISV participants can immediately activate.

SaaS product & price

Every journey starts with the first step. For success in the SaaS business, it is the definition of the desired product(s) with which we believe we will create maximum impact. During this session we will create a stable foundation for building profitable SaaS products. This also means that we will be talking about the only "P" that brings in the money - PRICE. Pricing decisions represent one of the hardest ones to make, as the future of your business highly depends on them - go too low and you will be out of cash in no time, go too high and you will not sell enough to achieve profitability.

During this session we will help you:
- Understand how to properly identify your best product candidates
- How to define specific and compelling value proposition
- Understand basics of competition assessment
- See all the pricing options you will need to think about
- Understand what goes through your customer's mind before making a decision to buy
- See what other are doing with pricing

This webinar is your essential tool for your product to start earning money. Don't just push the rock up the hill, take some time first to install the wheels!

SaaS Place & Promotion

Once we have the product, next question we face is - how to distribute it? On the topic of Placement, we will focus on the sales channels for SaaS products, discussing direct vs. Indirect channels keeping in mind differences between B2B and B2C products. To get your first customers, we will move on to promotion. This is the field that mostly comes to mind when someone mentions "marketing". This part of the session will help you understand more about creating a set of tools for communicating with your customers - consisting of different tactics from advertising to PR.

What you can learn in this session:
- What are direct sales channels?
- What are indirect sales channels?
- On what should you focus depending on who you are selling to?
- How to create your own sales network that gives your product the best chance to succeed?
- What is promotion mix?
- What are the most usual tactics that you will choose between?
What works best for SaaS products?
How to make your own promotion mix?

This is the last of the essential steps when creating your SaaS. And don't worry - this is not the end, it is just the beginning of your SaaS journey. Once you cover these 4 steps, you can move on to discovering addition steps - People, Processes and even Physical Environment.

A strong start with Microsoft: Startup program & FoundersHub

Join this session to learn how Microsoft supports SaaS companies at the beginning of their journey: all about Microsoft for Start-ups Program graduates, then and now.

Marketplace SaaS Accelerate (In Person)

According to Gartner's Future of sales report, by 2025 80% of supplier and buyer interactions will occur in digital channels - this is also why Marketplace is (living rent free) on the minds of many companies, in particular B2B SaaS vendors. Microsoft's Commercial Marketplace promise is to support in targeting a new customer segment, to enable expansion to new geographies and help reduce the cost of sales. Even though marketplaces are considered to be the future of selling and buying software, they are still a rather unchartered territory, as only recently conversations around integrating them in the overall sales strategy were initiated. Join us at our Amsterdam Schiphol office to learn directly from Microsoft employees and ISV partners how Marketplace can be embedded into sales engines and how in doing so, new opportunities for SaaS businesses can be unlocked.

What about taxes?

Deep-dive into the tax, legal and compliance components of a SaaS business with subject matter experts from KPMG's Emerging Giant's team.

Azure – the cloud for software companies

Given its nature as a software company, Microsoft created the Azure platform for application workloads. Running modern cloud-native applications has been in Azure's roots from its birth. Nowadays, Azure is a full-blown cloud platform with the ability to run any workload you can imagine.

However, its origins position it as the absolute best option for any modern ISV with the vision of building cloud applications. Native support for the whole current serverless and microservices stack and legacy support for various workloads through the power of VMs makes it a perfect host for your next app modernizing endeavour.

After participating in this webinar, you will:
- Be able to compare and contrast the various compute options for your apps (e.g., VMs, App Services, Containers, Serverless, etc.)
- Familiarize yourselves with Storage services in both relational and non-relational manner (e.g., Azure Storage, SQL Database, CosmosDB)
- Understand the purpose of connectivity services for various hybrid scenarios (private networking, VPN, IoT Hub, Service Bus, etc.)

Join us on this discovery journey to understand the full power of Azure platform for your business.

The truth about the Well Architected/Cloud Adoption Framework

A conversation with CloudNation on what it takes to build a strong infrastructure that accommodates growth as a SaaS business scales up.

SLA & Monitoring on Azure

We've got to the point where all our cloud applications and services are up-and-running. Our next concern should be: what happens when they stop working and how to minimize the impact of this unwanted scenario? We'll answer that question by exploring Service Level Agreements (SLA) for specific services in Microsoft Azure and using the power of Azure Monitor, Log Analytics, and Application Insights to detect possible failures in time.

This webinar will enable you to:
- Understand the SLA for the most used Azure Services (e.g., Virtual Machines, App Services, SQL Database, Cosmos DB, etc.)
- Distinguish monitoring solutions in Azure given its purpose and target
- Have a clear understanding of what steps to take to increase the overall availability of your workloads in Azure

Find out more during this session led by Nephos!