Prevent “Cloud Spare”: Professional Services in the Cloud Era

Grazed from Business2Community.  Author: Don Simpson.

Whenever I get the chance to talk with our sales divisions, I always like to weave in a statement that gets their attention. During a recent meeting to discuss Professional Services, I started by saying, “The products that you resell are worthless!” After a pause for effect, I added, “Unless the customer actually uses the product.” I now had their attention.

What made me think of this was my time in the federal government as an agency CIO. Within the first few days on the job, I was briefed on a multi-million dollar software purchase that occurred more than two years prior. This agency had been spending several hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on maintenance and the software was up for renewal again. However, the software was pure “shelfware,” still in shrink-wrap: There was no adoption…


Fast-forward to today and you cannot pick up an industry magazine without reference to, or specific focus on, the cloud. It is also interesting that not a single industry forecast disagrees with the hockey stick upward trend related to public sector cloud adoption. The promise of more, faster, and cheaper is real … but a worthless promise unless agencies are actually using the technology…

Read more from the source @ http://www.business2community.com/tech-gadgets/prevent-cloud-spare-professional-services-cloud-era-0775033