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Since the time cloud computing became a buzz word in the industry, I have met many partners who think “cloud opportunity” is an oxymoron for the channel.

This could be because Cloud has, in many ways, eaten into their customary solution business. And, they are not wrong. Markets that were traditionally growing very fast—systems infrastructure for instance—have been influenced greatly by cloud. The spending's have not stopped, but they have shifted. On-premise investments are slow, while growth in enterprise IT spending on cloud-based offerings is much faster.

This reminds me about some of the predictions that came up a decade ago, when many doomsayers in the industry said that Cloud will lead to the speculative demise of the channel. Those predictions have been proven wrong as resellers gained significant traction in the cloud-based IT economy.

At the same time, the whole Cloud phenomenon has been a race for relevance for partners, and it still is. Channels need to move beyond the traditional on-premise technology procurement and project-based deployments.

According to Gartner, Cloud is a key driver of IT spending, with segments like enterprise software exhibiting strong growth, with more of the budget shifting to software as a service (SaaS).

The agency’s latest IT spending forecast shows that spending on datacenter systems will be down to $190 billion through 2022, from $195 billion in 2019. At the same time, spending on Infrastructure as a Service will grow from $39.5 billion in 2019 to $63 billion through 2021.

These are clear indications of where the opportunities lie in the future. To grab a bigger piece of the pie, partners need to showcase relevance and the ability to cater to the widely varying customer needs. There’s no one-size-fits-all approach in Cloud; your offerings should be based on where the customer is, on the cloud adoption spectrum.

Here’re the areas that partners can focus to be part of your customers’ cloud transformation journey.

Cloud migration assessment: Any business would prefer to ‘look’ before it takes that giant leap to Cloud. Cloud assessment tools enable customers to evaluate the pros and cons of shifting to cloud, its cost implications, application suitability, requirements and readiness. Partners thus get to be part of the customer’s cloud journey even before the shift to cloud has happened. This is also a great foot-in-the-door technique for partners to get a share of their customers’ growing cloud wallet. With their position as a ‘trusted technology advisors”, reseller partners stand to gain. There are excellent and simple tools available in the market today to effectively assess and plan their cloud journey in advance.

Cloud migration solutions: Simple and non-disruptive migration to cloud is every organization’s dream. Cloud migration solutions allow them to seamlessly migrate workloads to and from cloud environments, with minimal risk and zero downtime. The market for cloud migration tools is largescale - right from simple cost-effective tools to sophisticated, comprehensive tools.

Security and encryption on Cloud: Trusted access to cloud still remains a concern for organizations once they move the data to the cloud. Authentication-as-a-service offers great potential to customers in this context. With just more than 30 percent businesses encrypting or tokenizing sensitive data within cloud applications, cloud data Encryption solution is another booming area for solution sellers. The combination of encryption and key management is increasingly becoming a preference for organizations today as data beaches raise.

Cloud management: With hybrid environments becoming a norm, organizations are looking at maintaining control of their resources on cloud as well as on premise. The goal is to improve efficiencies, security, performance and availability of applications on the cloud. Industry reports indicate that the cloud management market is expected to grow at more than 20 percent rate in the next few years.

Data availability on cloud: Backup is always the costumer’s responsibility, even when the data sits in the cloud. Cloud backup market is expected to grow at the rate of more than 26 percent and touch USD 4.13 Billion by 2022, according to Marketsandmarkets. Disaster recovery on cloud, on the other hand, is excellent proposition for beginners in the cloud journey as it showcases significant cost advantages.

This end-to-end cloud offering model has indeed been a great boon for our partners in India market, with many of them considerably improving their cloud revenues. So, Cloud isn’t really taking away business for reseller partners. If anything, it has only opened a whole new world of possibilities.