Carrying out the survey of 50 UK channel partners and 250 mid-market to enterprise end users, Ingram Micro Cloud, the master cloud Service provider, says that the channel has an opportunity to add a huge amount of value where further evolution is required in the way cloud services are offered, and that resellers have the potential to significantly enhance the relationships they have with their customers by being more disruptive through engaging more effectively with the cloud market.
According to the survey, Microsoft, Google and Amazon chart as top three popular IaaS solutions for the coming year for resellers, with Azure as the most widely-offered Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) solution in the channel. As an IaaS solution, Azure is already sold by 68% of the surveyed channel partners, followed by Amazon S3 at 57% and Google Compute Engine with 52%.
Apay Obang-Oyway, Director of Cloud & Software, UK&I, Ingram Micro, said: “If partners are to effectively grow their presence in the cloud marketplace, it is essential that they build their offerings around a solution that is highly available, secure, scalable, and more importantly enables the business to be more agile within its operation. The options are vast and the hyperscale nature of many offerings means that they can be leveraged to suit a wide range of business requirements. This represents a huge business opportunity for the channel, and explains why resellers typically offer solutions from a variety of providers. This need to be flexible and agile is exactly why these top three solutions seem to be most prevalent within end users.
“For example, Microsoft Azure’s capability to develop, create and manage apps ideally places it for partners looking to cover a wide range of IT roles and responsibilities with their end user customers,” said Apay.
Of those cloud partner respondents whose organisations sell Microsoft Azure, almost all (97%) say that the platform has positive attributes that make it easier to sell. A total of 73% cite its high availability as a key factor, with 65% seeing well-performing security as an important attribute.
Apay concluded: “Cloud’s biggest future impact on innovation will lie in how it will facilitate the adoption and implementation of new technologies as part of enabling the business strategy. The ability of end users to innovate around Artificial Intelligence (AI), robotics, Big Data and other breakthrough technologies, rely on the cloud’s role as an integrator of these technologies. Partners are in a hugely advantageous position in the sense that they tend to be fully conversant in the benefits of a wide variety of hyperscale cloud providers, so they should be making the most of this by using this expertise to bring new levels of value and success to their customers. After all, the true success of cloud lies not just in migrating traditional infrastructure, but in ensuring that cloud solutions facilitate greater flexibility and robustness in the face of a rapidly evolving technology landscape. By taking the lead in this area, channel organisations can become the disruptors, rather than the disrupted.”