07-May-2019 11:51 AM
Posted by Prashanth GJ, CEO, Technobind
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.