Cloud Spending Trends to Watch

Consider some observations from MSPs about their customers and cloud spending.

O’Neill at Lemongrass notes that more clients are going direct to the hyperscalers, rather than buying through an MSP.

“They do it because they feel there will be a closer relationship, which, in turn, will give them a bit more leverage over the hyperscaler,” he explained.

But the reality is this — and it’s one fellow channel partners may want to emphasize to potential customers: When purchasing through an MSP, end users get “exactly the same access, capabilities and discounts” as they do when going direct. And they arguably get better support. Still, a new trend is popping up where MSPs are fielding fewer resell deals, O’Neill said.

Another area to watch pertains to multicloud. Supporting multiple cloud environments is tough, and makes spending management harder. Organizations often fare better when relying on a third-party partner such as an MSP so they don’t have to assign valuable internal resources to expense and optimization administration. ClearScale’s Vasilyev argues for this approach for an additional reason.

“One thing we often see is that companies haven’t figured out how to manage their cloud environments and applications efficiently,” he said. “Many are still using the same processes they used with their on-premises environments.”

Handing over management responsibility to a channel partner takes load off the end user and should deliver significant and positive outcomes.