Microsoft’s statements with regards to cloud computing were quite rapid during recent months, so this report in collaboration with IDC was expected: Channel partners who were prudent to invest more than 50% revenue in cloud have reaped major financial dividends and experienced exponential business growth.
Houston, Texas was the venue for company’s worldwide Partner Conference, also known as WPC13, where this report was presented. According to the report, cloud partners performed exceptionally well in Key Performance Indicators including increased customer acquisition, augmented profits, increase in revenue per employee and last but not the least unprecedented growth. The number of partners at the initiation day of the WPC13 as reported by VAR Guy was quite impressive.
Here’s a brief snippet of the statistics: Current businesses that use office 365=3.2 million. To top it off, 150,000 partners around the globe are able to retail office 365 and Microsoft cloud services. During last year, around 22000 partners did manage to retail Microsoft cloud services which constitute an impressive figure by market standards. But that’s not all the report brought to the forefront!
Obviously, the highlight of the research was that majority of the respondents wanted their cloud computing needs catered by a single service provider. On the same track, 68% said they expected a single CSP to provide a host of cloud computing services under a single roof. But most noticeably, a huge percentage was of the opinion that their CSP should post haste and move their cloud back to on premises if the need arises. To put it simply in layman’s term, customers don’t want to look up a multitude of service providers. This could herald dire circumstances for small scale companies, but the report claims a silver lining, i.e. they can build and sell on PaaS platforms to negate this.
The report points out that keeping the above trend in view best performing partners are opting for a hybrid strategy. The ability to offer hybrid options to customers yields best revenue generation opportunities, the report highlights. Considering the fact that cloud computing has far left behind all the facets of IT industry when it comes to exponential growth, even then, the customers will continue to rely on on-premises tech for quite some time in the future.
The report also shed light and emphasis on the new emerging cloud applications. Once business applications such as ERP were deemed to be the biggest outbreak followed closely by CRM and ERP Financial / Accounting applications. The demands of a typical customer has certainly transcended the menial requirement of mere collaboration and email workloads as envisaged by the report. This current growth spur is indeed good news for those associated with Microsoft. The report predicts that companies which have been in existence for more than five years are most likely to adopt cloud computing. This is because they’d want to negate the need for constructing an old school data center which comes with high maintenance and other costs.
