Parallels Memo to Cloud Providers: Netherlands Cloud Rising
A new study presented by Parallels indicates the opportunity for hosted and cloud service providers in the Netherlands is exploding, with the SMB hosted infrastructure and web presence market expected to hit €150 million (roughly $200 million) by the end of 2011.
The information comes from a Parallels survey of 400 Dutch SMBs of various seat numbers (1 to 250) and in diverse verticals about their cloud roadmaps, attitudes, concerns and so on, across the various segments of the cloud industry. And while the cloud productivity and collaboration segments of the survey were only designed to find adoption rates, not total market size — which means those segments didn’t contribute to that €150 million figure I mentioned — it’s all growing across the board.
As a breakdown, hosted infrastructure services (utility computing, managed hosting, virtual servers, etc.) contributed €85 million to Parallels’ calculations, while web presence services (domain registration, web hosting services, and so on) accounted for €65 million.
So how can service providers take advantage? From the Parallels study summary:
“Overall, we believe that the best way for service providers to propel growth in the Dutch SMB market is by targeting marketing messages to specific SMB audiences and by continuing to upsell the current customer base with expanded Cloud offerings.”
In other words, it’s all the same plays that pros and analysts alike have been calling for the cloud services channel (and the MSP and VAR spaces in general): Make sure you solve a customer problem, and always let them know that you can provide more cloud services than what they originally hired you for. Just because it’s the Netherlands doesn’t mean the game plan should change.
