Channel partners may find a bigger revenue opportunity in making it easier for customers to buy public cloud services, according to the results of a survey by 2nd Watch, a Seattle-based cloud services provider.

The online survey of more than 400 IT executives in the United States, conducted in late January, revealed that 85 percent would “pay a small premium” to buy public cloud from a channel partner if it were to make it less complex. And about four of every five within that 85 percent would shell out an extra 15 percent or more, the results revealed.

And a sizable minority of the executives surveyed – 34 percent - indicated they could use the help in buying, using and managing public cloud services.

Why is it so hard? Jeff Aden, a co-founder of 2nd Watch and executive vice president of marketing and strategic business development, draws a line between simplicity and complexity.

“To do a single app is not that hard,” he said in an interview with IT Best of Breed. “If I want to just go out and provision compute and some storage and do a single app, it’s not that complicated. But when I want to actually try to (install) multiple systems (and) have some security parameters around it, it’s required as a skillset that may or may not be within that (IT) group.”

“As you start to get multiple projects, the complexity increases and that’s’ where companies are telling us, ‘Hey, this self-service is great for the one-off, but as I try to integrate it as an overall solution to my business units and prospects, I need a little more control and management around it.’”

Yet the survey also found considerable interest among enterprise IT executives in public cloud technologies and outsourced management of it. For example, 89 percent of respondents said they use Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Compute Engine or Microsoft Azure, 2nd Watch said. Another 39 percent claim to have dedicated up to one-quarter of total IT spending to public cloud. And 43 percent said that at least half their cloud service spending went to AWS, underscoring the vendor’s market-leader position.

The degree to which enterprises adopt cloud technology is sometimes linked to an organization’s agility. Gartner has separated that into two categories: Mode 1, which embraces traditional and sequential IT service delivery, emphasizing safety and accuracy and Mode 2, which emphasizes agility and speed.

In its survey, 2nd Watch extended that into IT procurement: Mode 1 buyers tend to prefer entire solutions over self-service, while Mode 2 buyers prefer self-service, even if it required a higher-skilled employee to assemble different parts or vendors to arrive at a final solution.

The survey found that 71 percent of executives see their organizations as Mode 1 buyers, with 29 percent calling themselves Mode 2 organizations. That result is also closely reflected in how they deliver IT services, with 72 percent of respondents saying they emphasize sequential processes and linear relationships - a Mode 1 viewpoint - over short feedback loops and clustered relationships, which reflects a Mode 2 behavior.

Although this is a new survey by 2nd Watch from which the results will provide a baseline, Aden foresees more organizations shifting toward Mode 2, even if they hang onto some Mode 1 behavior.

”Typically, nowadays, there’s a partnership between Mode 1 and Mode 2,” he told IT Best Of Breed. “So, it’s not completely removed from one another, especially in larger organizations.”