New industry data from cloud distributor intY has revealed that resellers are struggling to upskill and provide the necessary tools needed to sell and deliver cloud solutions.
The survey, taken at intY’s flagship Cloud Fest conference, hosted in London in September, gathered the opinions of the UK’s most prominent resellers. It reported that 37 per cent of cloud resellers identified a lack of staff skills to support the solutions as one of the biggest challenges to selling and delivering cloud services, the highest rated opinion. In addition, 31 per cent of respondents rated not having enough staff to sell cloud solutions as one of their biggest challenges.
Resellers are increasingly positioning towards a “cloud-first’ business model, moving away from their traditional markets of primarily hardware sales backed up by the occasional software package. The survey reflects a growing recognition amongst resellers regarding the value that cloud services can offer, with 51 per cent agreeing that cloud services had given them a competitive edge in the market. However, without the requisite skills in their organisations, resellers risk missing out on the potential benefits that cloud services can offer them.
Craig Joseph, COO at intY, reflects on the findings of the survey: “The lack of skills in both sales and support of cloud services presents a double threat. Resellers who can’t offer a convincing and seamless cloud solution to their customer’s risk being forced out of the marketplace completely, and missing out on the potentially huge revenue streams to come from cloud computing. For enterprises, the transition to cloud services is critical to enable them to take advantage of the operational efficiencies and potential for new product and application development that cloud technology offers. An enterprise that wants to succeed in the era of digital transformation must look to the most effective technology to help them do so, and it is increasingly clear that this will be the cloud.
“We believe that it is our duty as a value add distributor to help our resellers upskill their staff and give them the tools they need to succeed in the market. We focus on providing thorough training programmes across our whole product range so that our resellers and partners can feel confident in, and able to support, the tools that they are offering their customers.”
Leveraging its vendor relationships, intY, which is celebrating 20 years this quarter, provides an extensive range of cloud services and solutions from industry leaders such as Microsoft, Symantec and. Acronis. Recently, intY announced the strengthening of its senior leadership team with a number of strategic appointments designed to reinforce the continual growth being seen across the business. This included the appointment of Aaron Watts as VP of Customer Experience, Becky Hunt as Chief People Officer and Krista Linnell as Chief Marketing Officer.
Joseph elaborates further: “Celebrating 20 years is a massive achievement, but critically we don’t see this necessarily as milestone for reflection but one to reaffirm our continued growth aspirations. Evidence for this can be seen by our recent investment into the strategic leadership team which is designed to take us to another level and enable us to continue growing the business. We’re increasing our presence in the US and we also want to drive further investment into the UK, mainland Europe, as well as Middle-East & Africa (MEA). It’s been an amazing 20 years but we’re very much looking forward to the next 20 and beyond!”
