By Jesse Frye

IDC says that approximately $56.6 billion was spent globally on public cloud in 2014. By 2018, that figure will exceed $127 billion, representing a compound annual growth rate of approximately 23 percent — six times the CAGR of the overall IT landscape. According to Silicon Angle, throughout the next five years, we’ll see a 44 percent annual growth in workloads for the public cloud versus an 8.9 percent growth for “on-premises” computing workloads.

The size of the public cloud market means you can’t ignore it. Yet as Amazon Web Services, Google and Microsoft jockey for customers, price drops are becoming commonplace, ultimately making it difficult for channel partners to benefit financially from reselling public cloud to their customers. Google’s latest cuts mean services can be had for as little as $0.01 per core hour.

There appears to be this notion that because everything is moving to the cloud, there is no opportunity to differentiate or add value. The reality is that you have plenty of chances to help clients overcome both their existing challenges and new problems sure to be created as companies implement a variety of disparate cloud technologies.

My advice? Focus on crafting services that reflect each customer’s unique operational demands.

To start, partners can help customers get to the cloud more quickly than competitors and at a lower cost. I’ve heard several leading industry analysts say that the majority of IT organizations are waiting until the last minute or are not considering the impact that cloud migrations will have on their networks and users. This is a great opportunity for channel partners to offer cloud discovery and readiness planning services to help customers test the cloud waters, and to select the best providers and services. Approximately 52 percent of all workloads moved to the cloud either stalled or failed across the leading cloud vendors, according to Enterprise Management Associates, with some providers faring better than others. That’s a lot of wasted time and money.

Why do such a high number of migrations end in failure? Sometimes it’s a result of not properly identifying all of the dependencies for a particular application, sometimes it’s mismatched workload sizing in the cloud, sometimes it’s network-related performance issues. These are all areas where solutions providers can add value.

Channel partners can also offer cloud migration services by partnering with a machine migration provider, such as Racemi, RiverMeadow, AppZero, Rackware and others. There are over a dozen of these machine migration tools on the market, so informed advice on success rates and what platforms and cloud providers are supported is a hugely valuable service. Many of these machine migration tools cost around $200 per server move, and many companies are planning on moving thousands of servers into the cloud.

Most organizations considering cloud moves expect those shifts to take three to five years and quite possibly even longer to complete. Channel partners that align themselves with vendors offering value-added services for companies moving to cloud will be able to play more of an orchestration or a project manager role in the process.

Last but not least, security is usually the top issue cited when IT leaders are asked about their cloud concerns. Channel partners can add value here by helping customers ensure that their data is secure. Either offer cloud computing security services yourself (here are a few ways to get started) or partner with a specialist. In addition, many organizations have regulatory and compliance issues that can be addressed by offering disaster-recovery-as-a-service; guiding customers to the best DRaaS provider to conform to certification status and meet the needs of protecting their organizations’ data is invaluable. 

Pretty much every IT function can be purchased as a service today, from infrastructure to platform to software to disaster recovery to desktops to unified communications and so many more. Channel partners needn’t become technology experts in each and every area, but they do need to become cloud experts and learn to evaluate and broker services. Become an expert in understanding the most common problems addressed by cloud, how services will (or will not) work together and the limitations of various different options — all of this is important to developing trust with your customers.

Be open to adding new services and consulting opportunities into your business model. You cannot rely on hardware margins as you may have in the past. With most organizations looking at public and hosted private cloud, the future for channel partners is to help their clients get to cloud faster, more efficiently and at lower cost points. Be creative and think outside of the box while developing strategies for your business.

Jesse Frye is marketing director for RISC Networks, a leading analytics software provider in cloud IaaS, data center, UC and core network technologies. An industry leader in technical product marketing and product management, he has led major product launches for companies such as Cisco Systems, General Electric and LANDESK Software over the last 15 years. Frye holds an MBA from Norwich University in Northfield, Vermont, and is a veteran of the United States Coast Guard.