So You Want to Build an Azure Practice: Business Benefits for You AND Your Customer (Part 4)

Welcome back! In my last post, I wrote about the benefit of scale and reach as it pertains to the cloud. I’ve also written about business benefits of speed to market and low barrier to entry in my previous posts.

Today, I want to cover off on one more business value point before I turn the floor back over to Matt. So without further ado…

Business benefit #4: More Intelligent IT Spending

For SMB organizations, cash flow is super important and operating expenses are preferred over capital expenditures. Implementing on-premises equipment requires a significant up-front expense of new hardware. And of course, whenever there is a new hardware purchase, organizations will always purchase that new hardware with excess capacity so that in the event of growth, the hardware will have the capacity to handle the growth. But what if there isn’t growth? Now that organization has spent good money on hardware that won’t get utilized.

With the trend of cloud pricing being downward, SMB organizations have the opportunity save that up-front cost of expensive hardware by using exactly the resources needed today, without excess capacity. Then, when there’s a need for more capacity, the organization can spin up the solution in a larger environment with the click of a few buttons. The great thing about that is that the company uses that capacity only when they really need it.

And speaking of using resources only when they’re needed, most SMB organizations are not functioning on a 24x7 basis. Because Azure is a metered service, organizations only pay for virtual machines when they’re up and running. It’s similar to how I tell my kids to turn the lights off when they leave a room. If they leave the room and don’t turn off the light switch, the meter still runs and my electric bill at home continues to get higher. For SMB organizations, there’s an opportunity to shut down the environment at the end of the day, and then turn it back on when it’s needed. While the environment is shut down, the meter doesn’t run. There’s a great opportunity here to capture significant costs savings.

For Microsoft partners, what a great a opportunity to help your customer experience those significant savings. Whether it’s through providing a CapEx vs. OpEx analysis, or whether it’s building automated scripts to help shut down and start the environment. These are both examples of how a Microsoft partner can leverage expertise and knowledge to create your own intellectual property. You can utilize your intellectual property to package into your managed solution for your customers and deliver that as value add to your customers. It’s a great way to build a recurring revenue stream that saves your customer money, and creates a loyal customer for you.

Please be sure to bookmark this series home page at https://aka.ms/buildyourazurepractice to subscribe or catch up on previous posts.

Terry Stein, Azure Partner Channel Development Manager; @TerryStein_MSFT