Channel Partners: Cloud Services Momentum
Among the survey highlights: Partners are adding cloud services for the following reasons...- A desire to expand their portfolio (37 percent of respondents)
- Lacking cloud services is a competitive disadvantage (32 percent)
- To win new customers (13 percent)
- Increase revenues per customer (10 percent)
We assuming the missing 8 percent of respondents had a mix of responses.
When asked about customer revenue, wins and retention due to adding cloud services:
- 66% reported an increase in revenue per customer
- 63% reported improved customer retention
- 23% reported they have won new customers
When asked about the impact of cloud services on quarterly revenue
- 15% reported increased quarterly revenues of between 11-19%
- 41% reported increased quarterly revenues of between 6-10%
Predictably, StorageCraft pointed to cloud momentum within its own partner ecosystem. For instance, StorageCraft Cloud Services and the purpose built DRaaS (Disaster Recovery as a Service) channel grew four-fold in the last year alone, according to Shridar Subramanian, vice president marketing and product management at StorageCraft.
Still, StorageCraft did not disclose actual revenue figures associated with those cloud services. Nor did the survey result announcement describe partner profits from cloud services.
Laggards Are Running Out of Time
With the current trend towards cloud services for IT infrastructure, I agree that MSPs that are not currently offering cloud solutions will soon be at an extreme disadvantage with clients. While only 32 percent of those surveyed claimed this as their motivating factor, I believe this is also the driving force behind wanting to expand their services portfolio. So, while 37 percent of the channel partners claimed expansion as their main motivation, I think that number is skewed by the underlying motivation of competitive disadvantage.