New research from Brocade surveying 500 channel organisations worldwide shows that professional services in the area of cloud computing is expected to be the main revenue generator for channel by 2020. If this is to be case however, vendors need to play an important ‘enabling’ role by enhancing their own capabilities, tailoring their partner programs and making it less complex, increasing flexibility and developing innovative products and solutions. At the moment lack of all these factors is impeding channel in their efforts to move toward cloud-based professional services.
For the majority of channel respondents, professional services today accounts for 25 percent or less of revenues. The survey also revealed growing customer demand for professional services. The biggest hurdles to this are complexity and CapEx constraints. Another interesting statistic is the fact that only 11% of respondents seek innovative financing solutions from their vendors and 19% for marketing funding― both important competitive advantages when trying to build a brand and reputation rather than sell on price.
Regan McGrath, Senior VP of Worldwide Sales at Brocade said, “Revenue focused channel programs like our Brocade Alliance Partner Network, combined with differentiated technology solutions that help address customers’ needs for innovative and easy to deploy networks, flexible financing solutions such as Brocade Network Subscription, and tools and resources that help channel develop their reputation as consultants, will all become increasingly critical to developing competitive consultancy businesses that drive significant revenue returns.”
Regan cautions that the channel need to be critical and evaluate their vendors vision, strategy, technology and enablement programmes to ensure that they complement the partner’s efforts in offering professional services.
