Case Studies
xaas pricing
CASE STUDY
How XaaS Pricing Productized Years of Expertise
Since 1996, Technology Business Research (TBR) has provided tailored, subscription-based research and insights to the world’s largest global technology vendors. Throughout this time, the team conducted so many competitive pricing analyses that they had become renowned experts. As a result, they decided to productize this expertise into a scalable vendor pricing intelligence platform.
And so XaaS Pricing, TBR’s internal startup, was born.
“We know pricing analysis, competitive intelligence, data collection and taxonomy building very well,” said Bryan Belanger, senior director, XaaS Pricing. “But we are complete novices with software development. We had created a concept for the XaaS Pricing product and collected some data into a clunky set of CSV files and a few reports but needed help transitioning our process from manual content to a SaaS-based platform.”
This required support, from back-end data architecture design to building the front end for the web application.
“York IE helped by being adaptive, responsive and timely. We are just starting up, so we’d often get feedback from clients that would change our direction. York IE was always ready to catch those changes and work them into our process.”
Bryan Belanger, Senior Director, XaaS Pricing
Enter York IE’s Product Development & Strategy Services
York IE helped XaaS Pricing take its Microsoft Excel-based minimum viable product (MVP) and turn it into a functioning SaaS offering. Because of York IE’s experience and the similarities between its own platform, Fuel, and XaaS Pricing’s, the team was able to help guide XaaS Pricing on strategy questions such as how to think about pricing and user experience.
“What excites me about projects like XaaS Pricing is being able to bring the knowledge and expertise from the team at TBR into a productized SaaS platform,” said Mike Veilleux, CTO, York IE. “The art of this project was digesting the knowledge into a product roadmap that was ambitious yet achievable in a reasonable timeframe.”
Being able to get both hands-on development support and product strategy guidance from the same firm was a major help, Belanger said.
“York IE helped by being adaptive, responsive and timely,” he said. “We are just starting up, so we’d often get feedback from clients that would change our direction. York IE was always ready to catch those changes and work them into our process.”
The XaaS Pricing platform has come a long way and is now ready for primetime.
“We went from a simple spreadsheet concept using data we manually collected to a finished, ready-to-go MVP SaaS product in a pretty quick timeline, thanks to York IE,” Belanger said.