Define XaaS and SaaS catalog management
XaaS and SaaS catalog management helps vendors organize and maintain product listings available to buyers.
Tasks can include adding and removing vendors, updating product information across sales channels, managing price points and tracking sales data.
Catalog owners will often turn to platform management tools to streamline and automate these tasks.
SaaS product categorization is also an important part of catalog management. Good product categorization lets sellers to structure the catalog items from products into logical categories. This in turn makes it easy for buyers to navigate through the catalog and the product information. Common categories include:
- Product names
- Descriptions
- Prices
- Suppliers
- Hierarchy
- SKUs
What is a XaaS product catalog?
A XaaS product catalog offers buyers a convenient way to browse and purchase services from a range of vendors and suppliers. It offers a direct point of sale for single or combined service offerings that helps to launch or grow cloud sales.
Product catalogs help buyers discover commercial product information to make better informed purchase choices. SaaS product catalogs contain software services and XaaS product catalogs contain a full range of IT services. This can include infrastructure, network services or server space.
Why is XaaS and SaaS catalog management important?
Effective XaaS catalog management helps to optimize the buyer journey. When catalog items are well organized with clear product information, buyers can easily find the services they need quickly, improving the overall customer experience.
Sellers can use catalog management software to maintain their product and service catalog and increase sales potential. Centralized management means that changes to product, pricing or vendor information can be made once and published across multiple sales channels.
XaaS catalog management is important from a strategy perspective for several reasons:
- Customers increasingly opt to buy products and services from a reduced number of vendors. Hosting a varied product catalog with a range of owned and third-party services supports this.
- Self-service is increasingly important to customers, replacing traditional sales interactions.
What tasks are associated with XaaS catalog management?
There are a range of tasks associated with XaaS catalog management. These most often relate to the following core activities:
- Vendor integration: This task connects the products and services listed in the catalog to the vendor’s operating system. This helps to create a single commerce pipeline that connects sales to fulfillment and billing.
- Product information management: It’s important to keep listed products up to date with the latest information. This could include new software updates, service manuals or marketing assets provided by the vendor.
- Pricing strategy and offers: Catalog owners can monitor and adjust price points by product or region, as well as bundle their products to align these with the sales strategy.
Learn more about PIM and vendor management.
What influences effective XaaS catalog management?
It’s important to consider how XaaS catalog management relates to channel business strategy and demand for the latest services. This rests on the specifics of each business, but some important common questions to keep in mind include:
- What are the most common business needs today?
- How does demand fluctuate across your SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS offerings?
- How wide and deep are the service offerings in your catalog?
- Should you offer catalog variations based on geography or use case?
- How easy is it for your buyers to use the product catalog?
- How easy is it to add new vendors and maintain ongoing business relations?
Being effective with your XaaS catalog management is important as today, buyers often prefer to purchase all their enterprise IT solutions — apart from hardware — as a service, making a broad XaaS product catalog essential for your business.
Learn more about how to launch a marketplace and master reseller engagement.
How can XaaS catalog management help you?
A well-managed product catalog offers huge ecosystem benefits across the whole supply chain.
- Vendors and resellers can increase the reach of products and services by listing in multiple XaaS product catalogs. This can help them to reach new geographies and customer segments quickly.
- In this way, product reach can be increased without the need for bespoke campaigns.
- Product catalogs across multiple sales channels help to capture more ARPU without adding heavily to margins.
- Buyers and service providers have immediate, convenient access to the latest service offerings from a single point of sale.
- Service providers can handle more customers and more orders by having a self-service product catalog.
- Product catalogs help to build brand loyalty and reduce churn by staying at the forefront of new business offerings.
