Offering cloud-based services provides SMB partners (partners deriving 50% or more revenue from small and medium businesses with up to 999 employees) with opportunities to gradually transform their product driven business model to a more service-oriented one.
According to AMI-Partners’ soon-to-be released study on “Mapping of Cloud Vendor-Partner Engagement Model within India SMBs”, India SMB channel partners have an optimistic feeling regarding the demand for cloud solutions/ services among their SMB customers. Keeping pace with the increased demand among India SMBs, there is a simultaneous strong growth in the number of partners moving to the cloud, particularly within the SaaS and IaaS spaces.
When it comes to selling cloud solutions, there are various innovative route-to-market models that are coined by young startups as well as the traditional global vendors. In today’s dynamic scenario, the cloud market is flooded with diversified offerings, starting from email solutions, website hosting services, and hosted productivity suites to advanced SaaS offerings like Business intelligence, CRM, ERP, project management and HR software. On one hand, vendors like Microsoft, IBM, Dell, Salesforce and HP are following traditional route-to-market strategies, while others like AWS, Tally, BigRock, Google and Yahoo are gaining major traction with their own ingenious business models.
Despite the hype surrounding cloud solution adoption, cloud-focused channel partners experienced moderate revenue growth over the last year. However, as SMBs are gradually becoming more comfortable with the concept of the cloud, partners are realizing the importance of developing a cloud value proposition to satisfy customer demands; consequently they anticipate a strong growth of about 20% in their cloud business over the next year.
From the partners’ point of view, while cloud awareness has substantially increased over the past years, lack of SMB understanding about cloud solutions and their inherent values are the major inhibitors for cloud growth in India. Though a number of SMBs have already opted for some form of cloud, a great number of SBs continue to be wary of the technology, requiring considerable support from partners for training and migration from an on-premise platform.
“Cloud partners are taking a proactive approach to address these issues by enhancing investments on providing training to cloud customer support executives and cloud sales representatives”, noted Poulami Paul, Research Associate , AMI-India.
This shows that cloud channel partners are beginning to use service differentiation to increase customer satisfaction. But partners look forward towards a full-fledged support from vendors, which will help them enhance their expertise when it comes to selling cloud services.
Furthermore, as per AMI-Partners’ latest study, an important aspect that Cloud partners and vendors should remember is that – quality of solutions and post-sales service are the major drivers to accelerate cloud adoption among SMB customers in India.
For a proper identification and evaluation of the cloud channel partners, AMI has come up with a segmentation model, based on the partners’ profile and business characteristics. It will help the vendors to partner with the right kind of channels to be successful in offering cloud services in India.
AMI has identified 4 major cloud business models: Cloud Resellers who primarily focus on reselling cloud applications without developing their own cloud apps or customizing apps (agent model),
Cloud Infrastructure Providers who focus primarily on offering hosted server, storage and other infrastructural solutions (including Platform-as-a-Service), Managed Service Providers who primarily focus on providing remotely managed services, and Cloud Application Developers who primarily focus on developing their own IP-based cloud apps or customizing vendors’cloud apps or integrating various cloud apps.
However, selecting the right partner is not enough. Cloud vendors need to do their part in helping partners boost cloud sales – they need to come forward with newer marketing initiatives aimed at the different partner segments and assist the partners so that in turn, they can convince SMBs of the value of cloud solutions.
