I had the pleasure this week to host a meeting in Cannes with Jean-Philipple Courtois and a few IAMCP friends. Jean-Philippe is President for Microsoft International which is everything outside North America - today approx 17,000 employees.
The intended topic for our discussion was policy shaping in Europe but of course we very much discussed recent events in the financial world that impacts us all. To be truthful - this became the real theme!
All partners in the room saw an increase in customer demand for cloud computing. We all agreed that in a downturn customers favors OPEX (Operating Expenditure) rather than CAPEX (Capital Expenditure). That way the cost is taken off the balance sheet and the cost can be much better aligned with 'ups and downs'.
There is a real partner opportunity for cloud computing - Microsoft can provide a few vanilla services with stellar SLAs and good margins for partners - and hosters can provide especially complex application hosting with a high degree of integration between the hosted environment and the customer's environment. And ISVs can team up with a nice hosting provider that either resell their software as a service or just becomes a safe haven for the ISV's resellers to point at.
I also see that many partners sell their own branded solutions and team up with a hosting provider for the delivery.
This year the demand for cloud computing have really picked up and at IDE we have grown this part of our business with 70% this calendar year.
Recurring predictable revenue means a lot in times when selling consultancy by the hour gets harder.
Regards, Per
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