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I have to agree, if your customer base for services does not majorly crossover with your products. I've seen many successful models that sell a high priced pro

I have to agree, if your customer base for services does not majorly crossover with your products. I've seen many successful models that sell a high priced product and sell services on top of it. For example, Joyent will sell you the whole cloud and then sell you support for implementation all the way down to NodeJS. I've seen this with other successful (often Node) shops, such as Pivotal and Hashicorp (Golang). This aligns the service with the product, so there's no reason for the product to lag behind. I myself have tried to create a product while also providing separate services, that can work to bootstrap a product company but is hard to maintain past a few clients. As another commenter mentioned, if the customer base is different the support questions will be very different. I'd see the product needing at least a separate dedicated engineer and support.

roel_v 10y ago
Yeah you're right on that boundary condition - SAP 'sells' software but they make the real money on the 'services' they provide to get that software they 'sell' to work. So indeed I do mean product/service where 'service' is something generic and the 'product' is an offshoot of developing the service (or not even that) but where there is little overlap in customers or even customer profile. Which I think is the situation the OP is asking about.
- HenryTheHorse 10y ago
  > SAP 'sells' software but they make the real money on the 'services' they provide to get that software they 'sell' to work SAP makes "real" money on software. Their professional services business is big but nowhere close to their license business (you can see the breakdown in their 10K), which is why they have a massive network of partners and integrators.
  - roel_v 10y ago
    Yes, SAP doesn't do all the services themselves. It's debatable whether in the context of this discussion the service revenue of the partners should be included for comparing. Regardless, I don't think the point of the ration services:product in their profit is material; that wasn't what I was going for. My point was: when services and product aren't symbiotic, it's a pain to combine them in one business, in non-intuitive ways.

roel_v 10y ago

Yeah you're right on that boundary condition - SAP 'sells' software but they make the real money on the 'services' they provide to get that software they 'sell' to work. So indeed I do mean product/service where 'service' is something generic and the 'product' is an offshoot of developing the service (or not even that) but where there is little overlap in customers or even customer profile. Which I think is the situation the OP is asking about.

HenryTheHorse 10y ago
> SAP 'sells' software but they make the real money on the 'services' they provide to get that software they 'sell' to work SAP makes "real" money on software. Their professional services business is big but nowhere close to their license business (you can see the breakdown in their 10K), which is why they have a massive network of partners and integrators.
- roel_v 10y ago
  Yes, SAP doesn't do all the services themselves. It's debatable whether in the context of this discussion the service revenue of the partners should be included for comparing. Regardless, I don't think the point of the ration services:product in their profit is material; that wasn't what I was going for. My point was: when services and product aren't symbiotic, it's a pain to combine them in one business, in non-intuitive ways.