Cloud the megatrend of today’s technology is transforming businesses and the speed with which it is transforming them and their efficiency, has accelerated over the past few years. Gartner, the IT research and advisory firm reports that “Cloud computing is mainstream, with approximately 58% of organizations well down the path of using cloud services to support some aspect of their business.”
451 research predicts that cloud will grab a major share of the hosting market as its share is expected to increase from 7% to 28% by the year 2019, as shown in the image below.
This shift is because enterprises find that they can ‘build’ faster and run better at a lower cost, with cloud. Further, it has unburdened businesses of the traditional IT business challenges and has helped them in creating a clear positioning and value proposition of their brands or products and in rolling out that proposition to the market, speedily.
Other key factors that build business cases for the different cloud types at an organization are shown in the below graphics.
Cloud – the catalyst for digital innovation
Digital transformation of businesses is under way – for everything from strategizing to marketing resources to support – business are going digital. Thanks to Cloud!
Cloud empowers organizations to develop new capabilities by helping them engage customers, empower employees, optimize business operations and transform products and services.
With digital transformation, business processes are going digital and this opens a window of opportunities for the service providers. As per the study, 41% of organizations are already onboard cloud, driven by:
- Best execution venue considerations
- Maximizing on-premises IT investments
- Opex-based IT resource extension.
But challenges like skills, expertise and lack of partners and other implementation and management challenges create multiple opportunities for the service providers – cloud enablement and management specialists, cloud brokers, MSPs, System Integrators, ISVs, security service providers, web hosts, VARs and more for the future digital transformation projects.
“89% organizations are willing to pay a hefty premium for the assistance for cloud solutions” – 451 Research.
The role of service providers is not only limited to migration of workloads to cloud but also management of the cloud services. The graph below shows the top cloud services that an organization seek management services for, from a service provider.
How service providers should prepare for digital transformation?
Digital business transformation is no more an option, rather it has become an imperative for service providers to stay competitive in business as technology is not only about staying up to date, rather it is about helping stay in business always!
To ride this profitable wave of digital transformation, Cloud service providers need to focus on providing multi-vendor cloud solutions like Office 365, Microsoft Azure, AWS, IBM cloud with automation. For that, they need to:
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- Modernize efforts:
- Plan business path for growth – Modernize plans, offer customized packages to cater to different needs of the customers. Focus on vertical specialization, develop understanding for data driven marketing facts, trends and targets, and adapt them quickly.
- Sell to right customers – Modernize marketing and sales efforts. Fix common pain points of customers with automation and adopt structured and methodical approach to launch cloud offers. Create, sell, advice and transact.
- Deploy right solutions and services – Modernize operations and harvest data. Diagnose customer’s culture to know them more. Get services and support that keep them engaging like hire good customer advocates, generate customer centric processes, automate and encourage Line of business(LOB) focused stages to drive maximum ROI and of course make premier support available for pre- sales and customer delivery.
- Modernize efforts:
- Add value added services to business
“62% of Cloud/Hosting Infrastructure spending comes bundled with Value-Added Services” – 451 Research.
This is the era of value added services. These services provide solutions to an array of issues related to cost, quality of service, and risk. Most importantly, customers always desire some added value for their business and such services deliver that.
- Identify cloud customers’ buying decisions
Today’s customer is well educated, as he has broad access to information about digital and cloud-based solutions. So, it is important to make him aware in engaging, impactful ways.
Design new solutions to meet customers’ unique business demands. Serve as a one-stop shop for customers – provide expert support, help in provisioning and billing—all with a flexible pay as you go business framework.
- Get hybrid and multi cloud management and implementation and management capabilities. They are in vogue as shown in the image below.
- Consider a central management and automation platform
This is true that you – a service provider, will grow when your customers will move and grow in the cloud. But selling cloud based solutions while managing different aspects of cloud business – billing, sales, marketing, inventory, pricing, support, analytics, reporting and monitoring etc. is not a cakewalk.
The need of the hour is an end to end cloud service delivery and business automation platform – RackNap. It will help you automate and manage most of your cloud business process functions – provisioning, monitoring, billing, invoicing, backup, support, ticketing, etc. and manage your customers from a single pane of glass.
The need of the hour is an end to end cloud service delivery and business automation platform – RackNap. It will help you automate and manage most of your cloud business process functions – provisioning, monitoring, billing, invoicing, backup, support, ticketing, etc. and manage your customers from a single pane of glass.
Bottom line
Service providers can add more value when they consider what are their customers’ outcome goals – uptime, availability, speed or efficient use of infrastructure. So, help your customers be a part of cloud revolution and grow faster.
Share your feedback in the comments section.
Very helpful Information, Thanks for Sharing.
Nice blog..Great work…keep doing it..