Post-Cloud Era

Representatives of both tech giants visited SADA during the All Hands week.

While the channels for some of their flagship products have become saturated, Safoian said Microsoft and Google still offer unique opportunities for solution providers that want to get ahead of the adoption curve.

The Microsoft delegation emphasized what it sees as a major shift away from selling to IT organizations, and toward working directly with line-of-business decision makers, Safoian told IT Best of Breed.

"That's the next journey. That's the opportunity for partners, and also for customers, especially for midmarket," he said.

The cloud makes it possible for smaller organizations to access technologies never before available to them: machine learning, data processing, unified communications. Solution providers should ask, "So what does that mean to the CFO, marketing people, salespeople, manufacturing and logistics organizations?" Safoian said.

The Google representatives hit the same note, he said.

Safoian believes 2016 will be a pivotal year for Google Cloud Platform in winning market share, driven by opportunities to go beyond infrastructure into such realms as application containerization and big data analytics.

But many partners also underestimate the potential of some more established elements of the Google portfolio; SADA has seen tremendous success of late in selling Maps and Search, he said.

On the Microsoft side, Skype for Business is still in its infancy, and "it will completely transform the world of telecommunications," Safoian said. "Not just devices, but telco services. They're going to challenge the old guard. They're not first to take PBX to cloud, but the biggest, most ambitious."

With ExpressRoute, a networking technology for creating fast, private connections, Microsoft helps solve what's long been a major stumbling block to offering voice in the cloud: the last mile from the service provider over the public Internet.

Safoian also believes Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online is still an early play in a wide-open market.

But to maximize the potential of those technologies, the IT channel must be willing to adapt.

"I need different people: business consultants, data experts, UX/UI experts, designers, management consultants, product managers; roles a typical SI three years ago would think, ‘That's not what we do, not the kind of people we have,’" Safoian said.

Those types of employees are now flowing into SADA Systems as it expands its practice nationally and takes over another floor in its North Hollywood headquarters.

SADA is also expanding into application development, capitalizing on knowledge it has gained working directly with customers as a cloud solutions provider. The company has already closed a deal with the City of Chicago for an app that leverages Google Maps to help city departments coordinate construction work.

"We're entering the post-cloud era," Safoian told ITBestofBreed. "The last five years was about 'Where am I going to move?’ and migrations Now conversations are around, 'Now that I'm on the cloud, what can I do that I couldn't do before?’"