Do we have our heads in the Cloud?

Part of Bell Micro’s go to market strategy is to have in-house business consultants capable of working with our partners and defining what cloud means to them and to discuss how it fits with their customers, or a specific opportunity. From that point, we are ready to go by supporting campaigns with vendor specific value propositions that focus on addressing the business issues that will help create, develop and drive additional revenues.

Understanding issues
Organisations have until now resisted embracing the cloud because they either don’t fully understand what it is or because they have not as yet mapped their business and IT needs to quantify the reduced total cost of ownership, or indeed investigated the increased return on investment they could achieve through a cloud enabled approach. In many instances it is fair to say that there is still a lack of appreciation for what can be done with the products and solutions that are now available to build future IT & business environments from.

It is critical then that resellers are able to understand the business benefits on offer to their customers but allowing them to instantly access the services they need without the concern for understanding or managing the underlying technology. In today’s business climate, there is a very compelling reason in deciding to adopt a highly scalable, flexible service over the internet on a ‘pay as you go’ model.

To do this successfully the focus of cloud sales material must reach boardroom level executives and other senior business managers. This year Gartner has identified adoption of cloud as being driven from the top down (53 percent of C-class compared to 37 percent of IT departments), so to successfully sell cloud the focus must shift from ‘how’ IT services are delivered to the ‘business value’ they bring. Do this and cloud will become a key addition to any sales portfolio