Even five years ago, many small businesses, migrating on-premises servers and applications to the cloud was considered a pain and channel partner revenue streams would also shrink in the process. Recent studies show that this channel-related cloud concerns have reduced and that many partners are actually thriving with cloud services.
According to a recent StorageCraft survey, partners are seeing per customer and quarterly revenue growth, expanded new customer acquisition, and improved customer retention as a direct result of adding cloud services to their portfolios.
The survey highlights that partners are adding cloud services with a desire to expand their portfolio (37 percent), to win new customers (13 percent), increase revenues per customer (10 percent) and very importantly have started believing that lacking cloud services is a competitive disadvantage (32 percent) in the digital world.
When asked about customer revenue, wins and retention due to adding cloud services, 66 percent reported an increase in revenue per customer, 63 percent reported improved customer retention and 23 percent reported they have won new customers. Predictably, the study pointed to cloud momentum within its own partner ecosystem.
Nonetheless, the study shows that laggards are running out of time. With the current trend towards cloud services for IT infrastructure, MSPs that are not currently offering cloud solutions will soon be at a big disadvantage with clients.
The survey shows how dominant cloud services are becoming and that MSPs that fail to keep up with the changes by not offering some form of cloud services, whether it is through monitoring, or offering infrastructure services, will be at risks to serve their clients.