Survey: Trusted Advisers Still Have a Role in the Cloud
A refrain among channel advocates musing about IT's future in the cloud is that even for customers interested in assembling best-of-breed collections of cloud services, they still want a trusted adviser to put it all together for them.
The other way of looking at it is that customers want a single throat to choke when things don't work.
In the form of a commissioned study by 451 Research, Microsoft added some survey-based buttressing for that argument. Microsoft released the hosting and cloud study, "Digital Transformation Opportunity for Service Providers: Beyond Infrastructures," during its Microsoft Cloud and Hosting Summit last week.
Aziz Benmalek, vice president for Worldwide Hosting & Managed Service Providers at Microsoft, blogged about the 1,700-respondent survey:
Half of all organizations surveyed consider service providers as vital for future digital transformation projects. Even better, 60% of those would be willing to pay twice as much as they currently spend to have a single trusted advisor solution to manage all their digital transformation-related sourcing, implementation, and management needs.
Additionally, the new research shows that 62% of cloud/hosting infrastructure spending comes bundled with value-added services, rising to 84% for the next hosting/cloud infrastructure engagement. By owning the customer relationship end to end it provides the perfect platform for partners to build value-added services for their customers that will create stickiness and differentiation from the competition.
Posted by Scott Bekker on March 27, 2017