Cloud Hosting

Microsoft has pointed to big opportunities for channel partners in hybrid cloud implementation and managed services in a blog postthis week, detailing findings from a new study.

The study, Digital Transformation Opportunity for Service Providers: New Paths to Beyond Infrastructure, was commissioned by Microsoft, conducted by 451 Research and examined more than 1,700 participants from 10 geographies.

According to the Microsoft blog post written by Aziz Benmalek, VP of worldwide hosting and managed service providers at Microsoft, the findings imply "enormous opportunity" for Microsoft cloud partners to help customers with their hybrid cloud implementations, as well as digital services.

"More than ever before, customers are looking to a single trusted advisor to provide transformation-oriented managed services and hybrid implementation," Benmalek quoted Melanie Posey, VP of 451 Research, as saying. "Customers are looking to service providers to not only transform IT, but also transform their entire business - to rewire the building and support new requirements, all while keeping the lights on."

Benmalek added that Gartner believes hybrid cloud will become the most common usage of cloud by 2020, so long as public cloud is part of the "overall" strategy. The exec emphasized the study's findings that 90 percent of customers would pay service providers a "hefty" premium for help with implementing a hybrid-cloud environment.

The exec noted that Microsoft currently has "tens of thousands" of partners working with enabling hybrid offerings, as well as cloud services, claiming double-digit growth in the vendor's hosting and managed services business over the past five years.

According to Benmalek, Microsoft's report shows that 2016 was the first time customers depended more on digital infrastructure than physical infrastructure. This is upping the services opportunity, as services will represent 74 percent of hosting/cloud spend this year, versus 71 percent last year, he said.

"Half of all organizations surveyed consider service providers as vital for future digital transformation projects. Even better, 60 percent of those would be willing to pay twice as much as they currently spend to have a single trusted advisor solution to manage all their digital transformation-related sourcing, implementation and management needs," Benmalek said.

"Additionally, the new research shows that 62 percent of cloud/hosting infrastructure spending comes bundled with value-added services, rising to 84 percent for the next hosting/cloud infrastructure engagement," Benmalek noted. "By owning the customer relationship end to end it provides the perfect platform for partners to build value-added services for their customers that will create stickiness and differentiation from the competition."

According to the survey, the top digital transformation projects for the next year include the financial services, retail and healthcare sectors, Benmalek added.

Short-term opportunities are available in data and site protection, including backup and recovery, disaster recovery/site protection and archiving, which all saw "substantial" boosts in current and planned usage from 2016 -2017, the blog noted.

Benmalekalso detailed longer-term opportunities.

"Longer term, a more strategic play is 'run the stack' services for the ongoing operation, management and support of cloud/hosting infrastructure environments, including end-to-end application management, proactive capacity planning, premium/on-call 24/7 support, incident management and remediation [and] infrastructure/application alerting and monitoring," the exec explained.

More:
Microsoft research claims big opportunities in hybrid cloud implementation, managed services - Channelnomics