The statistics abound – customers are moving to the cloud – period. Why exactly and how they are using it are key questions. These are opportunities for the IT channel to step in and add guidance and value.
Cloud Adoption Accelerating
According to research from IT research firm Tech Aisle, more than half of the SMB market is already using or plans to use cloud for core processes and applications. A few years ago, the stat was that 1 in 5 firms were moving to the cloud. The acceleration of cloud adoption is faster than most research firms had predicted – in fact 1 in 2 is a reason for pause for any CEO of a VAR or MSP.
Competitors are Pitching Cloud
For a majority of SMBs, cloud adoption is a top IT priority. So if your company is not talking about cloud on every call and in every meeting, then another competitor is. We’ve seen this many times at dinCloud when our partners bring us customers that they had been pursuing for years – until they brought up cloud, and suddenly gained an unprecedented level of exposure within the customer’s management team.
Migrating Customers to the Cloud
Cloud is still not a simple journey for customers. The mix of terminology, mixed vendor biases all contribute to the complexity. Beyond that, customer environments haven’t gotten any simpler. Again, Tech Aisle found that SMBs have at least 7 applications running that are leveraging or will leverage the cloud. Migrating these apps through technologies such as app publishing or hosted workspaces allows partners to ease the migration and provide rapid migration at the same time.
In fact, 2 in 5 SMBs are looking for the cloud as the only way to solve their issues. So the question is whether they will turn to you as their partner or a competitor.
Engage Your Customers
The first step is to understand what cloud offerings you can make available to your customers. By partnering with dinCloud, you can offer a host of services ranging from applications to entire desktops and entire data centers run in the cloud.
Then be sure to make your customers aware that you can help them in their cloud journey. Focus not just on the products but also on the migration and change management. These are the “gotchas” of moving to the cloud. If you can offer these capabilities, you’ll stand out as a clear choice as they move to the cloud.
You can simply introduce cloud to your customers as a referral partner. This simply means you pass the lead to dinCloud and we’ll manage the sales cycle for you while your team ramps up on cloud. If you want to be a little more involved in the sales cycle, you can be an affiliate partner and join sales calls to further educate your team on the selling motion for cloud. And for those that are ready to sell the services directly and support customers as a reseller, you’ll be able to manage customers directly through the cloud orchestration platform as well.
We’re here to help in any capacity as you make sure you protect your turf in this competitive IT channel landscape.
“Globally, 57% of SMBs are using or planning to use cloud for IT infrastructure but are transitioning to core processes and applications”
“An average of 7.3 cloud application categories are being used within WW SMBs”
Is there opportunity for cloud?
“WW – 32% of SMBs are using or implementing cloud to run their core processes and applications to improve business efficiency”
“For 23% of global SMBs cloud is the center-point of IT operations”
“For 83% of WW SMBs Cloud adoption is a top IT priority”
“43% of SMB business decision makers WW say that #Cloud allows them to introduce capabilities that would be cost or time prohibitive”
“For 54% WW SMBs greatest benefit of cloud is that it makes the line of business users more productive”
@AnuragTechAisle
