The global private cloud market is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of almost 30% from 2019 to 2025. This is fantastic news if you are a cloud provider looking for opportunities to increase revenues. Effectively, this means that those organisations able to deliver cloud services to customers across industry sectors will be well positioned for the ‘new age’ of digital transformation.
This does not mean you as a cloud service provider can rest on your laurels. To transform your services to meet the demands on your clients and become a successful partner, there are different avenues you might pursue. At VMware we call these the Cloud personas (Cloud Builder, Cloud Operator, and Platform Services Provider). You might fulfil in just one persona or could potentially cover all three areas. Inevitably, this will require some internal reorganisation as to what personas your respective teams will adopt and how it will fit into your broader organisational strategy.
Furthermore, you will also learn to adapt your compensation plans. There will now be less focus on signing a few large contracts, but rather nurturing smaller cloud business that will grow consistently and incrementally. The result will be far larger revenues via cloud solutions, with better profit margins. However, you must remember it will take time to grow these and it will not be an overnight success.
Transforming to multi-cloud service delivery
Yes, transforming your go-to-market model is easier said than done. But that is the nature of being a cloud provider. Thanks to evolving technology, rapidly changing customer expectations, and the push for digital migration, service providers must adapt or lose relevance.
For example, think about the aspects of being a Cloud Builder. In the VMware ecosystem, these are the ones that typically leverage Cloud Director to help power differentiated clouds. These partners are operating their own data centre and looking for ways to keep expanding from there. A true cloud platform enables customers to extend their environments into their own data centres providing them with the means to manage their entire infrastructure using a single interface and a single set of resources.
Beyond this, there are VMware partners operating in an Asset Lite manner to leverage the Hyperscaler IaaS offerings. With the advent of Cloud Director Service our partners can multi-tenant these Hyperscale offerings. This is where the launch of VMC on Dell will be interesting. It has already seen significant interest internationally.
Finally, there is Multi-Cloud Management with the VMware Cloud Services: These are tools to reduce the complexity for clients and allow them to harness the expected outcomes from their cloud strategy. There is no silver bullet approach to making the cloud work for customers. Instead, it is about a focus on the skills, solutions, and business requirements that will unlock the cloud in this digitally-led world for companies to become more agile in their strategy.
