At CREATE IT we’ve been analyzing the European market trends and journey for quite some time now. The reality we’ve been facing all these months supported by the projects we’ve been developing with straight proximity to the IT & Telecoms partners , enabled us to draw on some useful conclusions, trends, and possible shortcuts that may help to leverage a better, more informed, and modernized strategy for the “return to the Office” and for your Business Units, marketing departments and day-to-day operations.
“The CSP market reflects this; and may have received the single biggest stimulus for more than a decade. Microsoft’s Cloud Ecosystem registered a 15% growth in Productivity and Business Processes ( Teams, O365; Modern Workplace & Dynamics 365 both CRM & ERP) and another 13% on Intelligent Cloud (Enterprise & Azure).”
Consolidate Your Bussiness Growth Margins
26th August 2020
As we’ve seen in our past article, Consolidate your Business: Growth Margins and Catering for New Clients; the Cloud - based market grew quite significantly over the past 2 quarters, mainly leveraged by the CSP licensing from Modern Workplace solutions (in the case of Microsoft business model).
The Remote Workplace solutions (Endpoint Security & Access; Network Cloud Management; hardware such as laptops and peripherals; and Video-Conference appliances and devices) The mere adoption of Public Cloud as a hybrid strategy for the Datacenter, including mission-critical storage ; Backup & DR acted as a driver in Cloud based solutions , also.
According to Gartner latest findings; IaaS(Infrastructure as a Service) and PaaS(Platform as a Service) should quite soon overturn the position of SaaS (Software as a Service) in revenue and use cases, ensuing the need for a proper revision of strategy, market positioning and the predominantly a capable and focused team, that acknowledges and dominates the portfolio of solutions and tool extensively and intensively, and is able to efficiently draw and deliver a solution architecture that fulfills a growing need of multi-vendor platform, datacenter and application scenario.
Circling back to 2020 as of now; the peak surge in demand putted strains in the ability of your already over-demanded teams and customer care on handling and delivering Cloud products, services, and solutions. In Phase 1 of the global pandemic; corresponding to the 2nd quarter, most SMB markets and clients accepted every solution given solely that it could migrate their workloads and teams fast enough and maintain as much as possible the normalcy of operations.
As the timeline rolled out, companies got more aware and informed and began understanding the real potential of Cloud-based operations extended to a growing set of functional areas: Networking Cloud-based management, endpoint Protection ,visibility and control; Data Backup and Analytics; Remote and off-premises Cloud storages and virtualized desktops, across multiple locations, devices and regions. Talk about band-width and human-width! Even MSP’s – commonly on the forefront of Cloud-based adoption and implementation – faced Human limitations on delivering differentiated and added-value solution menu to such and extensive set of needs.
We are assisting of a clear gap between Market demands and technical needs/offer of both Partners; VAR’s and integrators. That should be one of the major concerns in your organization, since it’s a tendency to stay that already started to show up in recent years.
One of our major suggestions for overcoming this is two-fronted: first; certify and enable your Workforce and second, nurture good relations with the most experienced and proven MSP’s, partners and vendors.
We are aware that this may be hard to pursue day in day out, considering the already demands and limited staff. Our recent experience points towards the need for a clear separation of running-rate task (such as managing and troubleshooting licensing; quoting and simulate prices manually, advising and upselling solutions, updating clients & partners on new major updates regarding the products, etc) and business-catering strategies (expanding the client capabilities and technical skills, aligning workshops and webinars to showcase different user-cases; contacting dormant or not-so-active CSP clients; digital lead generation initiatives; success cases building; and so on).
By having this process sorted out, with defined and allocated tasks and priorities, one should have a better handling at forecasting business growth, technical certifications needs, where the bottlenecks will come and proactively address those, shielding the progress for the next quarters.
On the Human forefront, most companies are realizing that a new work modality is definitely a reality, where a mix of local office time combined with remote/work-from-home framework is the norm. It is mandatory for your team to be able to deliver a great service and accomplish your strategy on either modality. Our recent experiences showed us locally that the percentage of IT companies that were able to quickly deploy a 100% remote operation where particularly and substantially less affected by the pandemic and also granted a better service that improved on Customer satisfaction and trust; two major benefits that will help nurture a better business outlook for the Future.
IT companies were broadly less vulnerable to the socio-economical aspects of the present events, but the need to progressively return to the Office and to meet with clients is a necessity , human touch and interpersonal relations are needed for a flourishing and longstanding business relationship./p>
By having a de-centralized process, with multiple access and a general sense of overview, our clients were actually enabled to transfer or multitask workloads in every scenario, augmenting the team´s collaborative natures, trust, and of course Health and protection. Your new motto should be “Returning to Work Safely”, and this encompasses the need to have a solution for the necessity of picking up one sick leave absentee or sending your team Home in a very short notice. Your team will clearly understand that they are a centerpiece of the business and that your company is beside them on every front.
By leveraging this, you regain control of your team’s time to focus on building a prospective business strategy, looking in the long run and enabling to build the future. It reduces the need of managing the day-to-day; and instead gives you the real control of aiming forward:
- managing and overseeing sales for the next quarters;
- input business creativity activities that lead to better margins;
- manage business expansion and quota acquisition
- outline sub-segments to grow in
- schedule partner formation and product activation according to real sales projections
- specialize and differentiate your best partners and nurture them in new and challenging line-ups
- Manage customers, subscriptions, users, user licenses and user permissions. Assign types to customers and filter the available offers for each customer
Lets meet and evaluate your own strategy by including our CloudCockpit platform, a multi-vendor & multi-client suite that enables a Future-proof Cloud-based Business model!