How To Get Customers Thinking About Hybrid Cloud Services

For many companies planning to adopt or expand cloud services, deriving value and cost savings from their investment is the bottom line, and the decision is understandably challenging. Not only can there be uncertainty in relinquishing control of critical business services, but placing all of a firm's loyalty in one service provider can introduce new risk – which can potentially bring big losses if things go awry.

A hybrid cloud approach allows your customer to hedge its bets, and brings opportunities for resellers to gain new clients. It allows simultaneous but discrete adoption of both public and private cloud systems and reduces the customer’s risk of adoption. Resellers can propose a hybrid cloud system as a proving ground for new customers, demonstrating the strength of their offering through low-risk services and applications on their way to evolving towards offering more business-critical services.

This model has some impressive success stories. Social network gaming success Zynga, whose products like Farmville draw more than 240 million players per month, adopted a hybrid cloud approach to ensure they provide a compelling user experience when new games are introduced. The rapid scalability a public cloud offers enables them to deliver top-notch performance early in a game’s life, when demand for their new services is unknown and less predictable. Similarly, my company worked with a web conferencing and services company that was finding difficulties in scaling to meet demand as they expanded into new markets, so the company worked with resellers in those markets to handle spikes and new demand.

To create new customer partnerships through a hybrid cloud offering, resellers should:

1. Be Deliberate
Despite what many believe, migrating processes into the cloud isn’t always as easy as flipping a switch. So it’s important to carefully evaluate the suitability and value of each target application or service. In addition, this shift can serve as an opportunity for process improvement. If you automate a poor process you may make it faster, but that doesn’t necessarily make it better. That is a critical point for customers new to the cloud.

Execution time for freshly automated process may, for example, decrease from three weeks to three days, which seems like a significant improvement – but modernizing that process could reduce it to ten minutes. A service provider must help their customer unearth the most efficient and effective processes to ensure the greatest ROI. As well, automating the wrong process could help your customer fail faster than they would ever have been able to otherwise, and that certainly won’t earn you any trust points.

It is likely that not every one of your customer’s processes will be suitable for a cloud environment, and poor choices will lead to poor results. Baseline enterprise apps that are already highly functioning are certainly not good initial targets, and apps that have strict compliance regulations might also be something to leave to a later stage, or to simply leave alone. Instead, go after low-hanging fruit – processes that will truly be improved by a cloud environment.

Next: Deploy Strategically

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