Trusted Advisers Warned: Don’t Get ‘Caught Naked’ in the Cloud
Trusted advisers in the hyperscale market should be telling their customers that their experience through managed service providers will be light years ahead of doing it directly.
That’s according to Andrew Lydecker, president and co-founder of Avant Communications. He participated in an education panel discussion titled, “How Do I Make Money With Public Cloud?” at Channel Partners Evolution. He told attendees not to get “caught naked in the cloud,” but to “get dressed for the opportunity.”
Other panelists included Rich Cannon, senior director of industry marketing for Microsoft Worldwide Hosting and Cloud Services; Bill Santos, president of HOSTING; and James Tansey, vice president of global channel sales and alliances for Datapipe.
Cannon told attendees that his job is to “make you millionaires” by going to market with Microsoft’s service providers. Among the top value-added services are managed services, application hosting and security services, he said.{ad}
“We don’t want to sell direct,” he said.
As a trusted adviser, “you capitalize on that opportunity because this is truly the greatest shift in IT history,” Lydecker said.
“This industry is exploding, absolutely exploding, and it’s up to the trusted advisers to go out there and say ‘I have his option,’” he said. “Even if you’re not an expert, [understand] that Avant, our methodology, our capabilities, our sales enablement, will bring these types of providers to the table to make them look good, and ultimately their customers’ experience satisfaction.”
The key is not to be afraid of opportunities, and to get in as soon as a customer starts looking or thinking about a cloud strategy, Santos said.
“Get in early and find the right partner,” he said.
“I think that for a long time, people didn’t fully understand how to capitalize on the hyperscale market because there weren’t channel programs,” Lydecker said. “What you’re hearing here today from Microsoft’s mouth is that there is. It’s through the ecosystems of companies like Avant, that are bringing the Datapipes, the HOSTINGs, the Rackspaces, the TierPoints, bringing all of these managed service providers that can give a single pane of glass, move workloads around, give that managed service, give that warm feel, give that IT talent to the companies. There’s a massive lack of IT talent in the industry right now and managed service providers solve that.”
