During the 2021 CloudLIVE Solution Provider Summit, we had the opportunity to hear from Håkon Gutierrez, the VP of Business Development at Atea, to understand how they’ve adapted to meet the cloud-driven demands and rapid business transformation needs of their customers.
As cloud usage grows and environments become increasingly complex, keeping pace with the rate of change can sometimes seem impossible. To ease this burden, cloud customers look to managed service providers (MSPs) as a means of simplifying and standardizing their cloud program migrations and digital transformation initiatives. In 2021, the MSP market opportunity is valued at nearly $11 billion—a number that is growing at a compound annual growth rate of 25% (IDC).
During the 2021 CloudLIVE Solution Provider Summit, Sandy Hogan, Sr. Vice President of Worldwide Commercial and Partner Sales at VMware, had the opportunity to speak with Håkon Gutierrez, the VP of Business Development at Atea, to understand how they’ve adapted to meet the cloud-driven demands and rapid business transformation needs of their customers.
Atea and CloudHealth
Atea is the leading IT infrastructure company in the Nordics and the second largest in Europe, with more than 7,000 employees located in 85 offices across seven countries. The company provides a comprehensive range of products and services to help customers receive maximum value from their IT investments, from consulting and development, to implementation, operations, and maintenance.
Most of Atea’s customers operate in multiple clouds, so in order to help customers maneuver all the moving pieces with cost control, rightsizing, usage optimization, and more across a multi-cloud environment, Atea partnered with CloudHealth. With CloudHealth, Atea can manage hundreds of customer accounts at scale and streamline optimization efforts with a holistic view into multi-cloud environments.
Success in the cloud goes beyond technology
Håkon emphasized that when it comes to modern digital transformation, the hard part is not really about the technology—it’s the people and processes.
When we started this journey, everyone thought the technology was going to be the hard part, but it’s actually the organization itself that’s the most challenging part of entering this new world of cloud subscriptions and cloud services.
VP of Business Development, Atea
Historically, teams responsible for IT infrastructure management operated under traditional CapEx business models, selling data center equipment and one-off solutions. Now, IT teams operate within OpEx and Software-as-a-Service business models, where solutions are delivered on an ongoing basis, are continuously evolving, and go beyond just technology to also include strategic planning, implementation, and iteration.
We’re learning new things every day. And for every customer dialogue we have, we learn something new.
VP of Business Development, Atea
Håkon notes that shifting to a new business model with managed services and Software-as-a-Service solutions requires finding the right talent and training your team to deliver the right value proposition, while also accepting that it might take some extra time to get up to speed.
Importance of the partner-to-partner ecosystem
Whether it be partners combining skillsets and working together on a customer engagement, exchanging best practices, or sharing lessons learned, the partner-to-partner ecosystem is key to successful customer outcomes for managed service providers. Håkon explained that his team worked closely with Softcat, another VMware partner in EMEA and early adopter of CloudHealth. Atea leveraged some of Softcat’s key learnings in order to get a head start on their solutions and strategies as they went to market. You can see how Softcat delivers cost savings and control for their customers in our article here.
To see the complete conversation with Sandy and Håkon, along with all the other session recordings from the 2021 CloudLIVE Solution Provider Summit, follow this link here.
And if you’re interested in becoming a CloudHealth partner, see our Partner Program page for more information and sign up today.
