Peter Krass's blog

Midsized companies to the cloud: tough, but worth it

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For midsized companies, moving to the cloud isn’t easy. Midsized organizations — generally defined those employing anywhere from 50 to 500 people — lack the massive IT departments (or budgets) of large enterprises. Nor do they see the potentially high savings enjoyed by much smaller businesses. On both points, they’re somewhere in the middle.

Big clients? Give them even bigger cloud benefits

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Remember elephant jokes from when you were young? Q: What time is it when an elephant sits on your watch? A: Time to get a new watch. Seriously, you wouldn’t want even 5 percent of an elephant’s weight sitting on your watch. So why would large enterprises — the elephants of the business world — want to continue spending 5 percent or even more of their revenue on IT?

Big cloud benefits for your smaller clients

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“When you deal with the different levels of company — from enterprise to medium to small — each one is completely different,” says Mike Aquino, director of cloud services at Cetan Corp., a Chesapeake, Virginia-based provider of cloud, collaboration and workload-automation solutions. “They’re all moving to the cloud, but they’re moving for different reasons.”

Born in the cloud’ doesn’t mean you’re done

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As a channel partner offering cloud solutions, you know how important it is to practice what you preach. To convince your customers to move to the cloud, there’s nothing better than being in the cloud yourself. For many older companies, that can mean a lot of catching up. But even if you’re part of a company “born in the cloud,” that doesn’t mean you’re done.

A channel partner’s checklist for moving to the cloud

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Nearly 95 percent of channel companies say the cloud solutions they currently offer clients are either mature or somewhat mature, according to CompTIA’s Fifth Annual Trends in Cloud Computing report. That’s a big change in just five years. In 2010, CompTIA found that only 1 in 10 channel firms had any involvement at all with selling or using cloud solutions.

Need marketing help? Look to your suppliers

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Marketing is your most effective and powerful way of telling the world about your products and services—and then converting at least some of that world into paying customers. How important is marketing? Very. The average large corporation spends about 10 percent of its annual revenue on marketing, according to research firm Gartner. On a percentage basis, that’s nearly three times as much as those same corporations spend on IT, Gartner adds.

Channel the power of partnering

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With customers moving to the cloud, the challenges facing their channel providers are growing. In fact, over 40 percent of channel providers say the cloud is driving them in new directions, according to a recent survey by CompTIA, a nonprofit trade group. In the same survey, nearly as many channel providers also said their customers are demanding new services and IT delivery models.

Overcoming the cloud’s fear factor

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Who’s afraid of the cloud? You might be surprised to hear that lots of people are—possibly even your own channel customers. What are they afraid of? Typically, it’s the unknowns. Once their data and applications are moved to the cloud, how will they know they’re secure? Is their customers’ privacy protected? What happens if their cloud provider is hacked or suffers a major power outage? And where is all that data, anyway?

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