VARs & Cloud: Know Your Opportunities

Grazed from ChannelPartnersOnline. Author: Ken Mercer.

Cloud computing is catching the attention of CFOs, COOs and CMOs across the country, and that equals opportunity for informed VARs. The key to success? Bring to the table a deep understanding of how various cloud options map to business priorities. A few questions will help determine whether customers are best served by a public, private or hybrid cloud architecture as the network foundation for critical services and applications.

On a high level, when engaging with line-of-business execs, focus on enabling growth and the potential manpower benefits of cloud computing scenarios rather than just selling the cloud to replace private infrastructure 1:1. For example, say the CMO is worried that a marketing campaign might work a little too well. A hybrid-cloud (virtual server) option can help her sleep better at night by providing the on-demand flexibility needed to manage peak server usage caused by demand spikes. Hybrid cloud approaches can also help by providing geographic diversity for disaster recovery applications…

Don’t automatically zero in on capital savings. For example, everyone talks about shifting spending on servers and storage resources from capex to opex, but that argument may not hold up with a CFO trained to run bottom-line numbers over a three- to five-year span because infrastructure as a service (IaaS) providers generally drop their prices for storage and computing power much slower than Moore’s law would suggest. What often drives these prospects toward the cloud are savings in people costs. If a company hands off server configuration and management worldwide, or even nationally, they realize a huge manpower benefit…

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