The Cloud is bringing massive change to enterprise IT, improving business agility, scalability and mobility as it makes productivity-rich operations such as secure file sharing, collaboration and mobility more available than ever.
Forrester reports that the public Cloud market will be worth as much as $US191 billion by 2020, reinforcing that the trend is here to stay.
But the Cloud revolution is also bringing change to the traditional value-added reseller (VAR) by making solution partners more service rich and cost efficient.
The result is greater value from VARs that embrace managed services, delivering expanded solutions that bring real value to the customers they serve.
There are five main ways the cloud is driving the evolution of VARs and transforming them into managed service providers (MSPs) that offer more solutions, value and efficiency to business.
Remote Accessibility
The Cloud offers greater flexibility than ever for channel partners to provide implementation, management support and maintenance remotely.
As a result, partners can now deliver greater service without the expense of actually visiting the customer data center. Managed services and support can be provided easily through remote accessibility.
Greater Solution Choice
It wasn’t long ago that only the largest vendors delivered the scalability and accessibility offered by the cloud.
Now, vendors of all sizes are delivering products via the cloud so solution partners are able to select best-of-breed solutions that offer all the flexibility and power of the cloud with greater value.
As a result, customers can benefit from increased choice and better cost efficiency.
Lower Service Delivery Costs
With the economies of scale offered via the Cloud, solution partners are now also able to offer more services for less.
This is resulting in deeper managed service engagement and increased service partnership as VARs that were once only seen for their implementation support are also engaging to provide true IT as a service, reducing or eliminating the costs of expanding internal staff resources.
Bridging Two IT Worlds
Through remote accessibility and limitless scalability, VARs that are evolving into MSPs are able to deliver more service options than ever before.
The most astute channel players are able to deliver, and fine tune, just the right mix of on-premise and cloud solutions to bridge the integration of traditional IT operations into that of a Cloud enabled one.
These hybrid environments are being architected, optimised and managed with great service agility bringing both value and innovation to the customer.
Greater Growth Opportunities
For partners, the cloud is delivering exponential growth opportunities. They’re able to become more integrated into their customers’ business with the robust and scalable solutions that offer increased productivity and the service engagement options needed to deliver true managed services, offering greater customer value.
This allows partners to create engagements that are deeper, longer and more cost effective, and in turn drives increased experience and expertise.
As the cloud continues to transform the IT enterprise, expect VARs to react swiftly with the increased service options and choices that will deliver more value and productivity to today’s businesses.
The result will be greater product choices, lower cost manageability and improved agility to help businesses get a leg up on their competition.
By Sam Liu - Vice president of marketing Soonr, with extensive experience in mobile, Cloud and enterprise solutions.
