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?

The good news is, they don’t have to anymore. Large enterprises — those with 500 or more employees — can control their IT costs with the latest cloud services. For channel partners, that’s a unique, if challenging, business opportunity.

Sure, companies of all sizes are interested in the cloud. But different sized companies move to the cloud for very different reasons, and what many larger enterprises mainly want from the cloud is cost control. Their IT budgets are so large, sometimes billions of dollars, that even a percentage point or two in savings can make a huge difference. What’s more, these enterprises buy equipment and services in such large quantities, they easily qualify for the very deepest of volume discounts.

“Our large-enterprise customers move to the cloud mainly to save money,” confirms Mike Aquino, director of cloud services at Cetan Corp., a provider of cloud, collaboration and workload-automation solutions based in Chesapeake, Virginia. “In the cloud, they can do IT more cost-effectively and efficiently than they could with all their services on-site.”

Unlike SMB clients, large enterprises also have plenty of their own IT staff and expertise. That means they’re usually not looking to the channel for either manpower or know-how. Instead, what they often seek is the fruit of close partnerships the channel has developed with its trusted suppliers.

“We’ve chosen to partner with Microsoft because we use existing technologies that we've known for years,” Aquino says. “Now we apply it in the cloud.”

“Having Microsoft behind me lets me know that we don't have to be all things to all people,” says Richard Cummins, president and CEO of ISOCNET, a channel provider based in Crestview Hills, Kentucky. “For us, Microsoft has been a great resource. For example, when clients want high availability, we can afford to give it to them without duplicating all their hardware and all their systems. Microsoft allows us to do that in a cloud environment, and for pennies on the dollar of what we’d pay doing it on our own.”

Security in the cloud worries large enterprises just as much as it does SMBs. The difference is that most large-company CIOs don’t expect the channel to solve their security issues; after all, they have their own IT-security staff. But these companies do expect whatever solutions their channel partners offer will include robust security and privacy measures. That’s another place where the power of partnerships comes in. Big channel suppliers like Microsoft can help. They mitigate your clients’ security concerns and offer powerful, cost-effective security resources — and all without sitting on anyone’s watch!