How to make money using cloud from traditional on premise companies

Disruptive trends are on the rise and resellers need to get ready for it, according to Telsyte.

After extensive research into the Australian and New Zealand business and consumer market, Telsyte, speaking at a Distribution Central event last week, says spending outside of the IT department within organisations is on the rise, with disruptive trends increasing the pace of change.

“Rather than telling CIOs what to buy, what’s good and what’s not, we go to end users and ask them what they’re going to do. What are their future plans. That’s how we generate our research,” says Foad Fadaghi, Telsyte managing director.

Telsyte looks at disruptive technologies and how these are affecting IT budgets. Fadaghi says BYOD, Big Data and the use of free consumer applications within organisations are technologies making waves. The other is cloud.

While cloud services have been around for a while, Fadaghi says cloud enables organisations to become more agile, and the key question for resellers is ‘how can I make money from cloud from traditional on premise companies’.

Fadaghi says cloud services are still in the hybrid stage, and there is a lot of organisations using this mixed approach. “We are seeing investment in cloud and on premise on parallel,” he says.

Organisations are averaging three As a Service providers, and because of this sellers shouldn’t be put off if an organisation is already locked into a provider. “If your customer base is using one provider, don’t be afraid that they’re locked in, go after them.” He says 80% of enterprises will be using cloud services by 2018.

Fadaghi says a third of businesses are already doing something around cloud storage, and of that a third plan to move to the cloud in the next few years. “It’s the Dropbox effect. Buying a service instead of buying a product. The key is value add opportunities”.

He says tomorrow’s resellers are adaptable to change, and value-add services will always be required.

Telsyte forecasts around 30 percent of organisations will be using cloud communication services in business within the next two years. “We’re getting used to using cloud-based applications in our daily lives.”

Fadaghi references organisations using Skype as their softphone, and questions if desk phones will sink the same way regular mobile phones did after the introduction of smartphones. He says tablets will exceed regular desktop computers in business. “Mobile technology is forcing itself onto CIOs, just like cloud.”

“There are still opportunities for application services and sellers should be focused on that,” he says.