3 Ways to Boost Revenues with a Cloud Computing Product Strategy

Cloud computing has quietly taken over the high tech industry in recent years.  No longer is cloud computing confined to hardware virtualization.  Today, software and Internet companies are driving revenues by exposing every layer of the technology stack as cloud computing products.  Cloud computing has become mission critical for the product strategy of countless high profile companies, including Salesforce, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and on and on.

If your product strategy doesn’t already consider the impact of cloud computing, you might just want to keep a close eye on your lunch, because someone’s about to eat it.  If you’d rather hold on to your lunch and maybe even eat the other guy’s lunch, then here are 3 ways a cloud computing product strategy could boost your revenue growth.

1.  Turn infrastructure into products

If you’re selling an application—whether enterprise software or Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)—pop open the hood and take another look at the engine.  You just might have a few modules hidden within your application’s infrastructure that could be of value to other application companies.  Expose these value-added modules as cloud computing products and charge for them on a subscription basis.

2.  Sell data

Do you collect data that might be interesting to someone?  Offer your data through a cloud computing web service and charge a subscription fee.  Is the data sensitive, or does it belong to your users?  No problem.  Aggregate the data into interesting metrics instead, and then productize the aggregated results as your cloud computing product.

3.  Generate leads with viral promotional products

Offer free cloud computing products such as widgets to website owners and include a tasteful attribution link to your own website.  Widely distributing simple widgets with attribution will drive traffic directly to your site, generating leads.  Handle the attribution just right and you’ll also gain significant SEO benefits from adding countless back links to your site, driving up your page rank and getting better organic search results placement.  Then even more leads will flow directly from search engines.

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