Riding the Cloud Wave: Why Strategy Matters to Solution Providers

Why Strategy Matters?

Besides a Solution Provider’s financial health, one needs to formulate a sound cloud strategy. Not in the first place for the sake of having one, but to ensure that it supports the transition from a project based to a recurring business model, and to be fully equipped and ready once transitioned.

Still many that I meet, believe they can dictate with what technology they can answer a customer’s business need. Customers are way better educated than 10 years ago. And decision making power started to move from sole IT towards a Lines of Businesses (LOB) heavy one. Moreover part of one’s install base customers is eager to adapt to new technologies. Hence it is important to develop new services and offerings to address those new needs and wants. Failing to do so will eventually result in customers moving to new market entrants and long-time competitors.

In order to achieve the new state, time is of essence! On the one hand because the market transitions at high velocity and on the other hand the demand for shortening time to market is increasing by the day.

Implications & Solutions

The implication is that Solution Providers should look for fast ways to bring new technologies within their portfolio to effectively address and serve customer needs. This does not equate to just building Private Cloud solutions on premise, but to also actively look to tie that to hosted Private- and Public Cloud solutions. Orchestration and management is key here. And an area to add significant value.

Today the number of vendors and offerings is daunting. How can you cut through the clutter and decide which ones are best to bring on board?  Yes, that’s a tough question and challenge at the same time. Nevertheless “every cloud has a silver lining”!

My best bet is to put your efforts into industry leading and proven technologies that help you to meet your customer need for agility and help them to keep up with the latest innovations in their market. Think for example OpenStack, Microsoft Azure and Amazon EC2. SUSE helps to make computing convenient and cost-effective through those and other technologies.

Learn more how SUSE can be a foundational part of your cloud strategy and what SUSE can do to help you riding that cloud wave!