Cloud Services and Small Businesses
In 2011 Parallels conducted a market research study to help service providers better understand the current state of cloud hosting and the small to medium sized business. What they found was that today’s small and medium sized businesses are responsible for 15 billion dollars of the cloud market today and are the businesses that are most quickly moving towards the cloud. At the same time Edge Strategies and Microsoft did a similar study and what they found was that when looking to purchase cloud services, SMBs look to their existing partners (hosting companies, service providers, IT consultants, etc) for their services first, they prefer to purchase from local companies and they prefer to purchase multiple services from one particular vendor.
I believe as more giants come into the market (most notably, Microsoft and Google) and build global clouds they’ll focus on the breadth market commoditizing these offerings and leveraging their massive size in order to scratch out a profit. One would think this spells doom for the service providers today but I believe it’s just the opposite. I believe these companies will drive awareness of the cloud and help businesses better understand the advantages of the cloud and we’ll see a more rapid adoption of all things cloud. But how will Applied Innovations compete? The answer is the same way we have competed against larger companies successfully for 13 years: by building a deeper understanding of our customer’s business needs and continuing to offer a higher level of ‘high touch customer service’.
The downside to this level of service though is that it doesn’t scale as well as the breadth and commodity solutions do, so what do we do? The answer is in the first paragraph: “businesses prefer to purchase multiple services from one particular local vendor”. So we’ve been working on our strategy of how we’ll develop multiple services as business solution suites and putting the ground work together for a channel program where we’ll partner with a growing number of channel partners to deliver those services locally! Building a new business like this from scratch is no small task but I believed it was important enough that it’s become a core part of our long term strategic plan and something we’ve spent the better part of 2012 around formulating. Now fast forward to a couple months ago when I was approached by the CEO of a large UK based hosting company and asked if I’d be interested in acquiring their US based business because they were leaving the market. You see, this CEO approached me because they built their business around the Hyper-V Cloud platform (Same platform we’ve been blazing the path on for the rest of the industry) and because, like us, he’s focused on his customers and the needs of his customers and needed a company with a similar passion for customer service. The timing couldn’t have been any more awesome! Today I’m pleased to announce we’ve acquired the US based channel partners and business of that provider and will be operating these services as Awesome Cloud Services, www.awesomecloud.com.
I felt it important to share this information because I know a number of our customers today are in fact MSPs, VAR’s and IT consultants that require such services and many have asked me to deliver these services in the past. So with this acquisition we’ve gained an existing customer base, partner channel, additional infrastructure, a channel based product line and key employees that already understand this market. All of this coupled with our trailblazing industry leadership around the Windows Server and Hyper-V Cloud platforms will allow us to deliver your cloud, your way … Awesome!
We’re extremely busy building out these new service offerings and integrating the existing offerings and infrastructure but if you’re an MSP, VAR, SI, SaaS company or IT consultant, I’d encourage you to signup for notification on when the new service launch by visiting www.awesomecloud.com.
