Focusing on Cloud Only Is a Bad Plan

Grazed from Channelnomics. Author: Justin Crotty.

Enterprises have been dabbling with cloud computing and IT outsourcing services for years. Many have reached the point where they’re either comfortable with the functionality and reliability, or see that the economic benefits certainly outweigh the potential risks. This move to mainstream acceptance of cloud and IT outsourcing marks a significant evolution from “the dev/test period” to the “mission-critical era” and brings a great opportunity to the channel.

For one, this new era pushes IT needs and services beyond your block and tackle hosted e-mail and cloud-based backup. Rather than replacing or adding servers to their data centers, enterprises are looking to move application servers into hosted environments, or replace them with software services. In an effort to achieve this, many businesses are turning to systems integrators (SIs) for software, infrastructure, platform and professional services needed to support their cloud environments…

This is of course is great news for SIs because they’ve spent years developing, installing and supporting enterprise-class IT systems and have a tremendous capacity and deep experience in professional services. Yet, despite these advantages, the majority of SIs remain behind the eight ball when it comes to the development and delivery of managed, hosted and remotely administered services.

Why? Ironically, it’s because of their success. While smaller VARs and solution providers felt the pain of hardware and software commoditization almost instantly and made the move to adopt managed services models, SIs continued to make most of their money from professional services. There wasn’t the same sense of urgency and now many SIs are working to make up for lost time.

Do It Because the Market Demands It

With enterprise services expectations as high as the diversity of their application and support needs, SIs need the capabilities and capacity to deliver a comprehensive and integrated menu of managed IT services, or else risk losing their longtime customers to competitors and emerging cloud providers.

The path of least resistance (both time and expense) and the one that leads to more profits is partnership. SIs need to consider partnering with peers and trusted providers such as NetEnrich Inc., which have the capacity and proven track record of delivering and managing a variety of IT service offerings (both on-premise and in the cloud) with lower operating costs. Such partnerships also provide SIs with access to best practices and know-how that translate into a faster acquisition of experiences for in-house development.

Through partnerships, SIs can easily expand their managed IT services portfolio and expedite their time to market, ensuring they have the service offerings their enterprise customers want to deploy today. And through partnership, SIs can offer and support exotic, low-volume applications and workloads without incurring expensive overhead.

According to a recent IDC Enterprise study, enterprises are already devoting as much as one-third of their budgets to cloud services, and they are planning to increase cloud spending by as much as 15 percent CARG. At that rate, enterprises will have the bulk of their IT functions in the cloud within the next three years.

Are you ready to manage that?