Although almost 90 per cent of resellers in North America currently report some cloud “involvement”, at present only 25-30 per cent of resellers have businesses that are cloud or recurring revenue ready.
If you are currently an IT reseller you are currently being assaulted by a number of “invest in me, invest in me” messages being generated by a myriad of cloud, SaaS and MPS vendors and their distributors. At Channelcorp we estimate that 80-90 per cent of vendors have some sort of recurring revenue, cloud based story to tell their partners. Your challenge as a businessperson is to decide if a transition to recurring revenue and the cloud is right for you at this moment. If so which of the cloud “franchises” that vendors and distributors wish you to invest in will build the value of your business in the future.
Why now?
Is it unlikely that large numbers of resellers around the world are going to totally abandon their historic businesses this year and with nothing but the speed of structural change in the IT industry in mind, fully transition to an cloud/recurring revenue centric operation. There is beginning to emerge compelling evidence that customer facing channel partners are beginning to make serious investments in the transition or transformation to a cloud centric, recurring revenue driven business model.
Why should an IT reseller consider an investment in one or more vendor’s cloud franchises now? Very simple…the market growth numbers are too large to ignore for most resellers in the IT business. What if your competitors are rapidly developing the ability to respond to requests for cloud/SaaS based proposals from your customers. What if you have already lost a customer to a competitor that was able to deliver a cloud/SaaS solution that you could not deliver, and what if you don’t know this because you do not regularly undertake lost sale analysis.
You have read the research reports, seen the vendor presentations at the conferences and kickoffs, read about the cloud/SaaS driven mergers and acquisitions in the industry and talked to your partners and employees about the cloud and SaaS and where it is going. Why should you be considering an investment in building out your cloud/SaaS growth plan now…because there is something going on out there around cloud and SaaS, and the risk to your business increases the longer you wait to find out how the cloud and SaaS driven structural changes in the market will impact your business.
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About Channelcorp
Margaret and Bruce Stuart founded Channelcorp in 1989. The firm is a global leader in the assistance of reseller, distributor and vendor clients. Channelcorp specializes in the business model transformation that is required in the face of the structural changes to recurring revenue driven business models in the worldwide IT business (www.channelcorp.com/services.php). Channelcorp publishes and sells four industry- leading books and 12 white papers (www.channelcorp.com/publications.php). This independent firm has delivered consulting and executive education to vendor, reseller and distribution clients in more then 40 emerging, developing and mature markets around the world. (www.channelcorp.com/workshops.php). More than 25,000 channel professionals from around the world subscribe to the newsletter Channelcorp intelligence (www.channelcorp.com/newsletter.php).
