During the first week of June I was fortunate to attend the Ingram Micro Cloud Summit in Phoenix, Arizona. Being one of the largest distributors of IT products in the world, Ingram Micro had the foresight to bring together some of the best minds and top partners from the technology consulting and cloud services community. The main purpose was to hold an in-depth conference and look at the evolving world of Cloud services. Here are a few take-aways from the event:
Growth
Ingram Micro’s first Cloud Services event held 3 years ago had about 75 attendees (partners similar to Axxys), and this year’s event drew nearly 700 service providers eager to see the latest in available cloud services.
Some of the bigger announcements were that several new, world-renowned partners such as Salesforce.com, Veeam, Citrix, WebEx, content filtering/reporting software, WAN optimization solutions, hosted PBX (voice) with Siemens, hosted desktops with dinCloud, as well as many others, are introducing new cloud solutions and services this year.
One application seeing a big resurgence is CRM software. Salesforce.com has typically been the leader in this space, but there are a handful of new solutions such as Sugar CRM and Microsoft Dynamics CRM that are making a serious play for cloud business.
As I spoke to various peers and partners to see how they are aligning their service strategies around the cloud for their clients, I found all the answers to be the same…email and backup. But most of them are still looking at other lines of business applications their clients can lead with as they move toward the cloud.
The bottom line is that over the last three years the number of businesses interested in cloud-based applications has grown exponentially.
Axxys as a Cloud Consultant
So you may ask:
What is the advantage to partnering with Axxys when I can partner direct with a cloud solution developer?
Simple, it allows Axxys to remain the trusted advisor on our client’s behalf as we manage the relationship.
While the pricing model of the cloud may seem advantageous to businesses, it is still an application and it must strategically fit your business processes. Axxys has positioned our business to work with our clients to deliver cloud-based, premise-based, or hybrid solutions. From Hosted Exchange to Service Desk applications, or Virtual Desktop Infrastructures to VMware hosted licensing, Axxys can help identify the best solutions because our strength is understanding your business, understanding your processes, and aligning them with the right technologies and budget.
Model transition for Axxys?
Gartner, a prestigious technology-focused analyst research firm, gave a great presentation around what they see as the direction for our Industry. They still see the managed service provider as a key component in partnering with clients, but the relationship will change a bit. Businesses will look for an advisor that can provide a solution that has a nice mix of cloud capabilities and premise-based technologies. Those companies want to have conversations with technology minded people, like Axxys, that are concerned with aligning processes with solutions that are quick to implement, simple to use, and fit a cost structure that is advantageous to their business (capex or opex).
Axxys is very well positioned for this current shift we are seeing within our industry. Leadership within Axxys continues to work with our team to think outside the box for the best solution that fits our clients’ needs based on their individual processes. Just look for the big “X” in The Cloud….you will see our “stamp” there as well.
