This guest blog post is from Andy Lancaster, Sales Director for Next Generation Data Centre & Cloud at Dimension Data. Take a look at this alternative perspective to how Cloud has evolved over recent years:
This is a blog in the truest sense of the word. It’s not a sales pitch, it’s not an analyst-style academic exercise trying to predict the future. It’s just an honest account of what it is like selling cloud computing, based on my time in this industry.
I’ll skip the ITO sales (Accenture) and Application Private Cloud sales (Oracle) from my earlier sales career and go back to 2011 when I joined Verizon Terremark. This was an exciting time in the cloud world. Enterprises had started to sit up and list to success stories from other Enterprises who were very early adopters of cloud solutions. Yes, cloud was becoming mainstream and customers were using phrases like “we are looking at cloud”, “we are defining our strategy for cloud”, “we need to do something with cloud but don’t know what, or how” with increasing regularity. This was music to the sales person’s ears. By offering consulting and professional services we were able to help shape customers cloud strategies and advise them on their application strategy. Complete Data Centre application audits were common and recommendations were made around; leaving as-is on premise, retiring the app, moving to colocation or moving to cloud. The primary workloads moving to cloud at the time were customer facing websites, or internal applications with seasonal spikes in usage. There were very few ERP applications in the cloud and Big Data was just another buzz-word that few really understood.
There were a wide range of competitors but the pubic cloud market, as is the case today, was dominated by Amazon Web Services. That said, Amazon were not the biggest competitor to my sales teams. More deals were lost to the “do nothing” option than to the competition. Hesitancy and uncertainty in decision making in our customers was widespread. I suppose it was a case of, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’. Customers knew the benefits they would realise by moving to cloud, but the uncertainty often paralyzed decision making with careers possibly at risk for making the wrong move.
Fast forward to 2013 when I joined Dimension Data. This was a whole new world. A lot had moved in 2 years. Customer cloud strategies were, in the most part, defined and well down the road of execution. Many had moved not only customer facing websites to the cloud, but internal systems like e-mail or collaboration and were considering how next to place mission critical systems such as ERP into the cloud to increase agility and reduce costs. From a sales perspective the term “cloud first” was now commonplace. This meant that if a new application could be consumed from the cloud (SaaS), or hosted in the cloud (IaaS) then Enterprises did that by default. Only if cloud was not applicable would an alternative method of hosting be considered. This paradigm shift in only 2-3 years meant the hesitancy in decision making was almost gone. Customers now recognised that in order for them to remain competitive, they needed to be agile. Agile IT = Cloud.
In 2014, from a sales perspective, my team are now facing many new competitors that were not around a few years ago. The public cloud market is now dominated by a smaller number of larger players, so the CSP’s, like Dimension Data, have to differentiate by offering wider ranges of services ‘on-top’ of the cloud, rather than just focusing on the IaaS layer. Also, it is now rare for Enterprises to be using only a single cloud provider. I read somewhere recently that most are using an average of 5 cloud providers across the SaaS, PaaS and IaaS spectrum. This is another huge leap in the cloud adoption story, but has introduced a new challenge. With multiple clouds, what about aggregation? What about consistency of service levels? What about consistency of performance? In response, vast partner ecosystems are emerging via cloud brokerages and cloud aggregators.
Now, I said at the top this wasn’t a sales pitch, but I believe that Cisco’s Intercloud strategy is a masterstroke. Harking back to their roots of connecting networks together, Intercloud achieves the same thing, but for clouds. There is no doubt that this will be a success and any Intercloud partners out there, (including Dimension Data) should buckle up and expect some major turbulence in the market as the immovable object (Cisco) is hit by the unstoppable force (Cloud). A spectacular event is unfolding.
No two days are the same in the clouds and I always look forward to tomorrow!
To get in touch with Andy please see his twitter profile here.
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