Cloud services: the opportunities for service providers

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This week brings me to Germany for WorldHostingDays, the world's largest hosting event – it’s not every day one gets to do business in a theme park, so I’m looking forward to a successful and fun event meeting Microsoft’s invaluable hosting and service provider community.

 

Cloud was the buzz word at last year’s event and it’s still very much front and centre. Small and medium businesses through to larger enterprises are shifting their IT focus to the Cloud and beginning to see it as a cost effective and agile solution for running their critical business applications. As organisations embrace the ever changing IT landscape and look to adopt new services, this creates a great opportunity for hosting and service providers to be a one-stop-shop for their customers. Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions, such as email and CRM, are clearly leading the transformation, but Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is quickly catching up and actually growing faster.

The Cloud is opening up technology solutions to smaller customers that would not ordinarily be able to afford them, with the added benefits of short-time to market and access to new revenue streams. Major Swiss telecommunications company, Swisscom, for example, wanted Unified Communications services but the infrastructure cost was prohibitive. By partnering with WinWorkers, Swisscom was able to create a suite of communications services that run on customer premises but are centrally managed by Swisscom (full case study can be found here).

 

At WorldHostingDays this week, Hyder Ali, Industry Director at Microsoft Communications Sector, will be discussing the cloud adoption trends across small and large enterprises and how service providers can bridge between Webhosting and Cloud computing to offer real value to their customers. Hyder will also be drawing on some brand new Microsoft research around SMB spend on Cloud services and the associated opportunities for service providers. Feel free to drop by Microsoft’s booth #2 for further details.

 

Serge Khayat

Senior Marketing Manager – Partner Cloud and Hosting
Microsoft Communications Sector