Last month's XChange Americas 2010 event gave me the unique opportunity to hold face-to-face discussions and brainstorming sessions with solution providers. We discussed the recent shift in customer needs, how these needs impact the solutions you provide, and new ways to position your business for a successful future.
At IPED, we understand that change can be unsettling to traditional solution providers. That's why we work to develop standard plans that clearly reflect your target customer market. We help you develop the appropriate customer offerings and adjust your sales and marketing strategies. We also provide services offerings and operational needs to support you in pursuit of your customers' business.
Let's break it down.
We'll start with your customer market. Today's IT customers are facing budgetary restrictions and looking to partners for more flexible solutions. For many, recurring operating expenses are more appealing than larger capital expenditures. This shift is pushing more customers to take their services off-premises and, in some cases, completely into the cloud. In fact, IPED research shows that by 2012, more than 30 percent of customers' IT spend will move outside their own data center. Between 11 percent and 12.5 percent of that will go toward a pure cloud offering in one of the following models: Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS).
But who is establishing these "needs?" IPED research shows that most needs originate in the IT department. Outside the IT environment, the buyer is usually a departmental leader or executive sponsor. This new group of buyers and sponsors prefer to "go live" as quickly as possible, avoiding any internal IT development queues. They appreciate the scalability of services that allow them to expand and contract their IT spend based on application users and capacity needs.
To ensure you're providing the best service, you must align your capabilities with your customers' needs, and adjust to supporting the emergence of the hybrid computing environment. As you embrace this new type of support, what changes should you make to your business strategy? Although the new hybrid customer environment results in a smaller initial investment in hardware, it's now the pre- and post-sales periods where additional revenue can be realized.
As SaaS and IaaS are introduced to customers, there will be a need for customer support in the cloud planning and migration process. This is where you expand your catalog, adding to your bag of presales tricks. You can now offer cloud assessments, data design, and "go live" planning packages. As for post-sales support, you can expand your catalog to include cloud migration support and hybrid cloud management.
The key to building and managing a hybrid system for your customer will lie in your ability to utilize PaaS and/or tools such as Microsoft Azure, Salesforce.com, etc. Remote monitoring and management offerings by Level Platforms, Kaseya or Windows Intune will also become critical.
But with whom do you partner to make this transition? Technology vendors are the traditional pick here. As you assess your vendor partners today, the question becomes: What is your role in all of this? What do you want your vendor's role to be? Are they offering the tools to build private clouds -- utilizing hosted capabilities provided by you? Or are they offering hosted services for sale by you? Or are they offering both?
BACKTALK: Contact IPED General Manager Rauline Ochs via e-mail at rauline.ochs@ec.ubm.com.
