As an IT provider and re-seller you are familiar with cloud services but did you know cloud performance has an impact on a business’ value? Knowing this: how is your business’ own cloud performance?
Maybe you do not feel the need to migrate your business processes yet because of all the hassle, but if your business value is important to you, you might want reconsider. This might be a good time to think about automating your business processes.
Factors increasing your business value
By automating processes from ordering to billing you will be able to scale and increase your sales, which will definitely boost your business value. You will not just be able to sell more but you will also prove to be sustainable as a company.
There are many factors determining your business value. Too many to discuss in this blog. Therefore, we will focus on a few which are mostly related to cloud performance:
Being future-proof/ future-oriented
Monthly Recurring Revenues
Cloud licences
Azure consumption
1. Being future-proof and future-oriented
In The Netherlands around 20.000 businesses are offering IT solutions. Quite a big number of these companies still sell traditional on-premise solutions but cloud services are definitely on the rise. In the coming years many of these companies will merge and the market will consolidate. Only those who can meet the customers’ expectations will be able to survive and turn out to be future-proof. To be future-proof, you will need to know what your customers are looking for. On what criteria do companies select an IT provider? From experience we learned an IT customer expects its IT provider to:
have a clear vision on cloud services
have sufficient staff (as a self-employed company is less likely to exist in 5 years from now)
have a broad portfolio
have knowledge about current and future IT applications (in which cloud services play an important role)
practice what they preach by applying these kind of IT solutions to their own business
unburden them by offering complete IT solutions
As you may have noticed, the purchase of IT is more often a responsibility of business departments nowadays, and less of IT departments. Therefore the last criterium is one of the most mentioned among IT customers for selecting a provider.
They expect you to facilitate in the provision, implementation and service of the purchased product. Only by meeting these expectations your business will prove to be sustainable.
2. Monthly Recurring Revenues
Cloud services generate steady income. When you are offering cloud services you are less dependent of (one time) projects. Although cloud services are subscription-based, in practice, its churn rate is lower than that of traditional re-selling business. Your monthly subscription based customers are more likely to stay with you for a longer period of time.
Steady revenues are essential to the business value for obvious reasons but the additional benefit is, it makes it easier for you to be able to plan financials and staffing ahead.
If you are automating your business processes like the sales and delivery of your cloud services, you will be able to scale and boost your sales. Instead of selling 100 licenses, you will be able to sell 1.000 licenses a month.
3. Cloud Licenses
The amount of cloud licenses is an indicator how many customers you will have in the coming years. As stated before: the churn rate of subscription based licences is not as high as that of traditional IT projects.
Not only the number of licenses, also the bundling and variety of subscription based licenses are important for your value. Has the client purchased cloud services with you for its entire or major part of its processes? In that case it is likely to stay on as a customer for a longer period. Also the more varied subscriptions you sell, the more flexible you are. You will be able to meet the customers’ changing needs.
4. Data consumption
Like the amount of cloud licences, public cloud data consumption, like in Azure or AWS, is also an indicator of the extent of cloud migration. The higher the data consumption the more sustainable your company is.
It not just the amount of data consumed but also what solutions are being migrated to Azure (or AWS for that matter). Are these merely development environments or core business systems? This is a reflection of the management’s vision. The more processes your customer has migrated to the public cloud, the faster you can adapt to his changes, which is an absolute must in the coming years.
Cloud services as a forecast
The business value reflects a business’ future, or expert’s forecast about its future. If a business is believed to be sustainable, it will show in its value.
This might be a good reason for you to take a close look at your business’ value and consider your own cloud performances and migration. To smoothen the transition, it is wise to automate your processes as much as possible. This will allow you to be agile and to scale your sales. Not only does this transition make it easier for you and your employees, it will also increase your business’ value even further.
If you would like to learn more on how to develop a vision on cloud services and implement it to your business, we warmly invite you to our event ‘Digitize or Die’ on April, 3rd in Houten. You can read more about the event and register here.
Author: Coen Korver, Managing Director Keenondots