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If you're an IT solution provider not into cloud computing, you're letting a substantial chunk of change pass you by. Spending on public cloud computing generates $21.5 billion in revenue according to IDC, and that number will balloon to $72.9 billion by 2015. You've got to play to win, as the saying goes. Here are five ways to approach that very lucrative market.
1. How To Sell Cloud Computing, Even If It's Not Your Core Competency
So you've read the tea leaves and know you want a piece of the cloud computing segment. Your SMB customers are now starting to ask whether they should move certain business assets to the cloud, as their larger competitors have done already. The move toward the cloud is growing, with IDC projecting compound annual growth rate of more than 25 percent, so if you don't provide what your customers are asking, then your competition will.
Action items:
• Educate yourself on what the different cloud offerings are and the benefits they provide. Vendors can be very helpful in assisting with this educational process.
• Determine how cloud services can complement your own offerings. By figuring out how what you already do can complement a cloud service, you've designed a new offering. Now, you're bringing something to market, rather than reacting to it. You're playing offense, not defense.
• Consider partnering with an experienced provider. That will round out your company's knowledge and understanding, as well as experienced customer service.
• By wrapping cloud services around products with which you are already familiar, you're creating a value-added package that is uniquely designed for your customers. You're also bundling products; it's the same concept as a fast food "value meal." As Robert Fuller, vice president of worldwide channel sales at Rackspace, notes in his How-To article, change your mindset and think about cloud computing as a way to be proactive with customers, rather than just reactive. “In presenting a new offering,” writes Fuller, “you’re given the opportunity to strengthen your relationship with your customers by acting as a trusted advisor – solving problems before your customers even know they have them.”
2. How To Integrate Cloud Computing Into Service Offerings
Now that you've familiarized yourself about what cloud computing is, and how as an IT solution provider it makes sense to create some unique offerings, it's time to figure out just how to do that. If you have a virtualization practice right now, the cloud is just an evolution of what you are already doing. (If you don't, start by offering virtualization, something that makes particular sense if you are currently in the storage space.) One way to look at the cloud is as "virtualization 2.0." Virtualization brought capital expenditure savings, but now it's time to look at how you can reduce customers' operational expenses by moving to the cloud. Pete Malcolm, CEO of Abiquo writes in his Channel Voices blog, “The hope with cloud computing and the self-service model is to cut out “the middle man” (in this case anyone in IT) from individual transactions and move to a model where IT is just a utility that users consume on demand.“ Solution providers will increasingly be tasked with providing insight and advice for cloud-based solutions as customers continue to look for ways to reduce costs.
"The best thing providers can do is include the cloud as part of broader solutions. Don’t change the approach you are taking to your customers, but make sure you can augment your current offerings with cloud-based solutions," said Margaret Dawson, vice president of marketing and product management, Hubspan. "For example, if you are doing a major network build out, can you leverage the cloud for any elements of that. Or, if you are building a new application for a customer, take the opportunity to develop an agile Web-based application. If your company is a strong .NET shop, then make the plunge into Microsoft Azure to leverage your core competency and still move to the cloud."
Action items:
• Your service offerings will need to accommodate a multi-hypervisor environment. Start now to bring on established hypervisor vendors and cloud-centric emerging players.
• IT solution providers should look to offer insight around deploying infrastructure aligned to business policies. They should be able to provide cost effective choices on where and how applications should be deployed, either onsite or in a cloud.
• Automate and orchestrate using REST, which solution providers can use to build Web sites that are easily read and used by machines. (REST is a set of principles that define how Web standards, such as HTTP and URIs, should be used.)
3. How To Use Cloud Computing For Disaster Recovery
Many storage VARs are familiar with virtualization and are actively engaged in that segment. Storage VARs are also frequently in the disaster recovery segment, and cloud computing can play a big role in DR planning. Cloud solutions are a natural fit for DR, because they store information offsite and are easily accessed in a time of crisis. With cloud-based disaster recovery, the IT solution provider can restore the physical or virtual environment, and end users can get back to work immediately. As Tom Kiblin points out in his online blog, disaster recovery in the cloud is offering companies more options to restore data quickly and effectively than with a traditional disaster recovery model. In addition, cloud-based DR is a cost-effective alternative to other options.
"We've seen that many small and mid-sized businesses do not have a disaster recovery plan in place, often due to the cost of maintaining the service. With disaster recovery in the cloud, enterprise-grade recovery of production environments is now an option for the SMB market," Eric Webster, chief revenue officer at IT solution provider Doyenz, said. "With a cloud-based disaster recovery service, infrastructure costs typically covered by the IT consultant -- such as hardware, bandwidth, data center, cooling, heating -- are absorbed by the cloud provider and included in the monthly fee you pay for the capacity you are utilizing in the cloud. Tasks that previously had to be done on-premise -- testing to see if software upgrades will be successful, for example -- can now be done in a dedicated environment in the cloud without impacting production."
Action items:
• Discuss with your customer what the acceptable amount of data loss would be, measured in time. Then talk about the suitable amount of time that can transpire before a business process is restored in order to avoid a break in business continuity. Ask, "To what point in time does the data need to be restored?"
• Determine which business processes should be backed up most frequently. IT solution providers can create a customized tiered system within the cloud that can more frequently backup certain applications. Traditional backup doesn't generally provide that level of customization.
Next: Two More Ways To Get Into Cloud Computing
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