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What is 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 



Contents

  1. What is a XaaS product catalog?
  2. Why is XaaS and SaaS catalog management important?
  3. What tasks are associated with XaaS catalog management?
  4. What influences effective XaaS catalog management?
  5. How can XaaS catalog management help you?


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.


SaaS Catalog Management


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.




Ready to learn more about managing product catalogs?


Here are some resources to help you explore the topic further, including CloudBlue’s product catalog solutions.


Vendor and Product Information Management

Learn More

What CFOs Must Consider Before Implementing a Digital Marketplace Strategy

Learn More

XaaS for Enterprise and SMB

Learn More









Mike Jennett, Director of CloudBlue Platform Strategy, is an accomplished business and technology executive. With a deep focus on product development and go-to-market strategy, he plays a pivotal role driving strategic growth and market expansion. Mike’s career is characterized by his adeptness in driving technological advancements and his commitment to leading digital transformations with experience including IDC where he was VP of the Mobility and Digital Transformation IEP practices, and HP where he held numerous leadership roles. Mike’s expertise is also reflected in his published works and contributions to multiple tech publications. Mike holds a B.A. from California Polytechnic University.
Having previously to strategic product management, agile transformations, and user experience in CloudBlue, Taylor Giddens heads the Services & Solutions team where he ensures smooth delivery, operations and solution growth for our partners and customers.

The team includes technical account management, managed services, support, custom solution development, and customer enablement.

Prior to CloudBlue, his resume boasts leadership of some of the world’s largest companies during their digital transformations and marketplace launches. Taylor is a practitioner of servitude leadership when it comes to enabling his team to drive positive outcomes on the road to operational excellence.
Laurens van Alphen, a visionary entrepreneur with over 29 years of internet technology expertise, serves as Director of Technical Managed Services at CloudBlue, responsible for Operations and Delivery of CloudBlue SaaS.

As a Dutch racing champion and car enthusiast, he brings the same drive to the tech realm, steering Keenondots from a managed hosting firm to a global cloud enablement leader. Laurens is celebrated for his outcome-driven leadership, deep industry insight, and passion for balancing business innovation with client engagement.
Lincoln Lincoln is CloudBlue’s Head of Global Sales; having been with the company since November 2017. Leading CloudBlue’s global go-to-market organization, he’s responsible for driving accelerated and sustained mutual growth with CloudBlue’s customers and partners, as well as forming new customer partnerships across the Vendor and Provider ecosystem. As part of CloudBlue’s leadership team he is responsible the organisation’s revenue and continued market leadership by delivering and supporting products, services and solutions to organizations in established and new markets around the world.

Before joining CloudBlue, Lincoln was AppDirect’s Regional Director, Asia Pacific & Japan, responsible for forming, building and leading AppDirect’s business and operations across the APJ geography. He built and led AppDirect’s fastest growing and highest performing region globally within 3yrs.

Before joining AppDirect, Lincoln was EMC’s Practice Manager, Cloud Service Providers, APJ, working with the leading Service Providers to maximise their Cloud Business presence & market success. Lincoln joined EMC in 2007, and has over 20 years’ experience in the IT industry, having been based out of Singapore, Australia and the UK. Prior to EMC, he was in range of sales and channel positions at Symantec and VERITAS.

Lincoln has an Honours degree in Business Administration from Kingston University in the United Kingdom.
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Brent is a Canadian based corporate lawyer with more than 20 years of experience as a strategic legal advisor both in private practice and as in-house counsel to large multi-national companies. Prior to joining Ingram Micro in 2008, he worked at a well-respected corporate law firm in Toronto, Canada and later served as general counsel for Toshiba Canada. During his 15-year tenure at Ingram Micro, he has held positions of increasing complexity and responsibility, and since being promoted to his current role in 2022, Brent is the legal lead for both Ingram Micro’s Canadian and global cloud businesses, as well as CloudBlue.

Brent holds a law degree (LL.B.) from Queen’s University, a Psychology degree (B.A. Honours) from Lakehead University, and has been admitted to the bar in Ontario, Canada since 2002.
Anurag serves as the Head of Product Management for CloudBlue and is responsible for product direction and driving innovation. His leadership has been marked by a keen focus on customer needs, growing the ISV ecosystem, and ensuring the continual evolution of CloudBlue’s product portfolio.

Anurag joined Ingram Micro in 2017 and has been instrumental in, positioning CloudBlue as an industry leading monetization platform for MSP’s, Telco’s and Distributors. Previously Anurag worked at Oracle and Microsoft where he managed many technology projects and programs.
As VP of Engineering of CloudBlue, Rony oversees the development and engineering efforts of the company. He is a recognized leader with more than 25 years of experience in Technology and Product.

Prior to joining CloudBlue Rony lead the R&D efforts at Tripwire acquired by Thoma Bravo, and Cedexis acquired by Citrix. Rony is a leader with extensive experience in transforming both complex technology problems into products that customers love and disjointed organizations into agile high performing teams.
Coen is a distinguished leader and entrepreneur in the realm of cloud technology. Currently serving as CEO of Keenondots and the Global Director of CloudBlue SaaS. He is passionate about driving innovation, fostering collaboration, and leading high-performing teams to achieve transformative results.

With a background as Managing Director of INTO Cloud and a pivotal role as Director of Products of KPN, he brings a wealth of experience in steering organizations through the complexities of the digital landscape.

Beyond the boardroom, Coen is a marathon enthusiast, demonstrating endurance and discipline in pursuit of both professional and personal goals.
Alyson has over twenty years of experience in demand generation, marketing automation and data management. She is responsible for leading the strategy and direction of the company’s brand, performance, and digital marketing.

Prior to CloudBlue, Alyson served as Ingram Micro’s Director of Global Business Intelligence Marketing Automation driving channel partner campaigns. Her tenure in marketing leadership at prestigious companies such as Western Digital, Ocean Institute celebrates redefining marketing campaigns and building top performing teams based on trust, experimentation, and results.

Alyson resides with her husband and three children in Orange County and is an active volunteer and donor within her children’s sports and education programs.

Darek Tasak is leading Customer Success & Value Creation for CloudBlue. In his role, he looks after CloudBlue customers globally during the entire lifecycle of our relationship: from the initial on-boarding, through in-life account management, always ensuring they build successful businesses leveraging our technology. Additionally, he is also in charge of Partnership & Alliances, as well as Pricing Management for everything we commercialize.


Before CloudBlue, Darek managed Ingram Micro’s Services division for hi-tech customers in Europe & APAC. His prior experiences include also launching and leading pan-European services business for TDSynnex, as well as strategy consulting with Boston Consulting Group (BCG).

As President of CloudBlue, Uddhav is a distinguished leader and visionary with nearly two decades of platform-building experience. He is an industry leader in digital commerce, the subscription economy, and monetization platforms.


Notably, at SAP, he spearheaded the transformation of their platform business into a multi-cloud platform-as-a-service, offering enterprise and developer-friendly subscription models. At Pure Storage, he championed the efforts to successfully disrupt the storage industry by creating revolutionary Storage-as-a-service, AIOps-as-a-service, and Disaster Recovery-as-a-service offerings with cutting-edge features and establishing a sophisticated subscription commerce infrastructure that is channel-friendly.


At CloudBlue, Uddhav guides and empowers businesses to rethink their monetization strategies by unlocking the power of digital ecosystems and marketplaces. CloudBlue provides enterprises with a mature multi-tier, multi-channel marketplace and monetization platform that enables usage-based subscription models and global delivery of Anything-as-a-Service solutions. Uddhav has played a pivotal role in shaping the future of the subscription economy through his innovative thinking and impactful contributions.

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