In a recent meeting, the CTO of a UK based MSP tasked me with the following question – ‘when all my competitors have, or will have, Cloud based service offerings, how do I differentiate mine from theirs?’ My natural instinct was to answer this by explaining some of the technical advantages of the solution I was presenting but having taken a little time to think on it, the answer became clear.
Technology will only do what it is told to do so it has to be the people who differentiate the offerings. MSPs who want to stand out in this crowded market place need high quality people to design and implement the services that deliver real competitive advantage to their customers – merely offering IaaS and PaaS is not enough these days.
So does this mean the technology doesn’t matter? Absolutely not. In fact, I believe this only strengthens the argument that technology is key to differentiation. If an organisation embarks on a journey of integrating a set to tools and infrastructure to deliver Cloud services, their high value IT staff will be consumed by architectural issues, integration and compatibility problems. The end goal will be getting something relatively stable to market rather than making money.
Those that invest in a pre-integrated technology stack with pre-defined process workflows will find that their key people can focus on creating high value revenue generating services that differentiate them from the crowd.
So, even with Cloud, it’s still about People, Process and Technology – very little changes in our industry.
No comments:
Post a Comment