Selling IT services has not been the legacy sales skill of the Tier 1 telecom service providers — nor has building downstream channel programs to recruit other solution providers, for that matter. So, how are these giants going to equally invest in their direct sales and marketing resources and build channel ecosystems to extend their reach into the burgeoning IT and cloud services market, at the same time?
In a recent study of 64 unique IT vendors conducted by Amazon Consulting, it’s clear that IT vendors value most the ability for the large service providers to directly sell and evangelize cloud services to their broad end-user base (See Figure 1: Vendors’ perceptions of the key role of service providers as a cloud services channel). In the next two years, it’s expected that these giants will create and deliver new cloud services that vendors’ traditional IT channels are not. However, more than 30 percent of vendors also think it’s critical for service providers to promote their extensive network and computing infrastructure to other smaller service providers and/or their agents and resellers, especially as a way to supplement the service providers’ professional services and SaaS development capabilities — or lack thereof (See Figure 2: Vendors’ perceptions of service provider collaboration, based on cloud customer needs). In vendors’ minds, this would include leveraging the carriers’ extensive contract management and billing-on-behalf-of services.
One of the biggest investments service providers will have to make is in their sales teams. They need salespeople who are savvy with on-premises IT solutions and capable of transitioning customers to private or hybrid cloud implementations. Given that IT vendors expect the larger service providers to focus their cloud services evangelism on enterprise and upper midmarket customers first, vendors will have to carefully orchestrate effective sales teaming with their own direct sales forces to create early cloud success in these important accounts.
