New Opportunities For CSPs Beyond Infrastructure, Microsoft Finds

A new study from Microsoft (MSFT) and 451 Research indicated that today’s cloud services providers (CSPs) have an opportunity to offer customers support beyond traditional hosting capabilities.

The study, titled “Beyond Infrastructure: Cloud 2.0 Signifies New Opportunities for Cloud Service Providers,” revealed that nearly 70 percent of the opportunity for CSPs now centers on application hosting (email and business applications), managed services (backup and disaster recovery) and security services (threat management).

Additionally, the study showed that the chief information officer (CIO) or chief technology officer (CTO) has become a primary decision-maker in the evaluation of hosting and cloud services, followed closely by the CEO.

Other study results included:

• More than 75 percent of customers are now beyond the cloud discovery phase and expect that in three years, almost half of their applications will be deployed in a combination of private and public cloud environments.
• Respondents indicated that they will dedicate their application hosting budgets mainly to database (57 percent), email (54 percent) and business applications such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM) and industry-specific apps (49 percent), and that most managed services spending will focus on backup and recovery (68 percent) and disaster recovery (54 percent).
• 73 percent said they have a formal Windows Server 2003 migration plan in place, and approximately half of these respondents said they will increase their use of CSPs in response to the July end date.
• 52 percent said their CIO or CTO is a primary decision-maker in the evaluation of hosting and cloud services, followed by the CEO, who is a primary decision-maker for 44 percent.
• 40 percent said they expect moving to the cloud to improve the quality of their technology and help grow their business.

So what are the key takeaways for CSPs? Aziz Benmalek, general manager of Microsoft’s hosting service provider business, noted that the cloud decision-making process is changing, and CSPs can serve as “trusted advisors” by highlighting the value-added services they provide to meet CIO and CTO expectations.

“Companies today are no longer using cloud as a cost-savings mechanism. Instead, they’re using cloud solutions as a way to grow their businesses and create new opportunities in terms of the services they offer, markets they serve and more,” he told Talkin’ Cloud.

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Microsoft and 451 Research surveyed more than 1,700 hosting and cloud customers across 10 countries between Dec. 2014 and March 2015 in the study.

What opportunities are available to today’s CSPs? Share your thoughts about this story in the Comments section below, via Twitter @dkobialka or email me at dan.kobialka@penton.com.