Cloud Service Brokerage – horrible term, right strategy

08 August 2014

In 2012, when I was working for an IT Service Provider, we had the pleasure of being a Gartner client and engaged with them on a number of occasions to review our Brand and Product Strategy. It genuinely changed our views on the world, and even if I am no longer a Gartner client I still feel this was money well spent at the time. The headlines were that the “future is Cloud Service Brokerages” and this is a path that few have elected to tread. Now we saw the value and understood the strategy, but were genuinely put off by the term “Cloud Service Brokerage”.

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What to do with Legacy systems?

18 July 2014

I went to an excellent event a few weeks ago, hosted by a Vendor, Disty, Cloud Provider and Consultant, that aimed to discuss the cloud marketplace and how its evolving. All round interesting stuff, notably regurgitating lots of previous materials, but each time its repeated it gets more real. Content for another blog I feel. The one statistic I noted down though was that “6% of all systems are unable to migrate to the Cloud”, given by a large Vendor as part of their discussion around the future of their cloud platform.

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Tier 1 isn’t always “better”

25 July 2014

Over the course of my career I have had the pleasure of working for some of the biggest, and not so big, Managed Service Providers and Outsourcers in the market place and one question has troubled me throughout. Why do Clients elect to pay a such a premium for a big brand when they could potentially get better service from a smaller provider?

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Vendor / MSP Interaction

04 July 2014

I had the pleasure of moderating a discussion at a major Vendor’s MSP Advisory Council this week, which as always was a very interesting event. In attendance were about 10 Managed Service Providers, chosen by this Vendor for their success in representing the Vendor’s product within their service portfolio and a number of Vendor staff.

The intention of the event was to provide the Vendor with some insight into where the MSP’s were taking their business, and therefore allow the Vendor to get feedback on their programmes and activities in this context – and I think it met most of its objectives. Interestingly though, a lot of the discussion was less strategic and more focussed on the more immediate and pressing concerns that MSP’s have about working with the Vendor community. They certainly aren’t unique to this Vendor.

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