David Manu, sales manager, Cloud Infrastructure, Citrix, explains why it’s more important than ever for the channel to be a strategic, trusted advisor.

As businesses embark on significant IT transformations aimed at drawing maximum value from cloud computing, are you fully prepared to guide your customers on their journeys and realise the significant revenue gains available?

We hope the answer is yes. After all, according to IDC, by 2017 public cloud services will be worth more than $107 billion, which is a significant revenue opportunity.

To ensure you claim your share, it’s critical you’re well placed to step up and become a trusted advisor to your customer as they undertake their respective IT transformations.

After all, no one understands the IT industry and how it impacts your customers’ challenges and objectives quite like you, which means you’re in the ideal position to offer advice and best practices.

Heart of the business

To achieve this, first and foremost you need to invest time and resources to get to the heart of your customers’ business to understand what they want to get out of their move to the cloud, and how this aligns with their objectives.

Having this detailed understanding positions you as a consultant on their journey as you will be able to advise them on how best to spend their budget on cloud services adding real value to their deployment.

For instance, if your customer is allocating large chunks of revenue for on-premise productivity suites, you could advise them to adopt similar solutions hosted in the cloud.

This would allow your customer to realise significant revenue and productivity gains as staff will be able to access tools and documents on the move.

Consolidate to deliver maximum value

The most successful partners in the cloud will be those prepared to consolidate their services to deliver maximum value to customers.

With a variety of cloud solutions on the market, there’s an inherent risk of over-diversifying cloud offerings – making partners a supplier of many technologies but expert in none – and decreasing the value you deliver.

Instead, by focusing your efforts on particular product sets, such as ERP or CRM installations, you have the potential to become experts in select fields empowering you to deliver optimum value to customers and realising the associated revenue gains.

Become the strategic advisor

As businesses across New Zealand and Australia begin to dip their toes in the cloud computing pool, now is the time for you to build on your established relationships to guide them on their journeys.

The reality is there’s significantly less margin in commoditised services compared to consultative relationships.

However, getting to the core of your customers’ business and becoming experts in your field will ensure you stand to benefit from both.