SMB Vendors find Success in the Cloud

October 10, 2011 Off By David
Object Storage
Grazed from FormTek.  Author: Dick Weisinger.

A report from AMI-Partners finds that vendors that are able to offer cloud-based solutions are more successful and their customers are more satisfied with the solutions that they provide.  70 percent of vendors offering cloud-based solutions to small and medium-sized businesses (SMB) found that they found that most cloud pilots rapidly expand the number of users and typically roll out to the entire company after just one quarter of use…

Jessica Efta, market development manager at AMI-Partners, said that ”a trend we are seeing is that many SMBs will start out with a focused cloud application or service deployment in order to gain a comfort level.  Once they achieve that with the cloud solution and the partner, they then expand the implementation to recognize the full value.”

AMI-Partners also found that cloud vendors, ISVs and resellers with competencies in the following five areas are most likely to achieve success:

  • Business Analytics
  • Unified communication & collaboration
  • Business Process Management
  • Mobility
  • Infrastructure alignment
Using this criteria, AMI-Partners found that among 72,000 channel partners that focus specifically on small and medium-sized business (SMB) market in the United States, only 20 percent had competencies in two or more of these areas.  Avinash Arun, Director of SMB Channels at AMI-Partners said that “high-value competency (HVC) partners drive 3 times the market opportunity compared to other SMB partners, and the margins they derive from these key solutions are about 25% higher than other partners.”
In addition, another component of success for vendors to SMB is the use of the cloud.  HVC partners are three times as likely to already be experiencing success if they deploy their solution in the cloud. Arun said that “success in the cloud is critical to the sustainability and growth of the partner ecosystem and to vendors who are betting heavily on this transformation.”
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