The cloud is one of the major trends in the IT industry.
Even in South Africa, where we lag behind the rest of the world in terms of speed and user penetration when it comes to broadband Internet – the latter due to prohibitive costs – cloud uptake is expected to accelerate in the near future.
“The cloud provides a great business opportunity for the channel in Africa,” says Simon Campbell-Young, CEO of Phoenix Distribution, the leading broad-based distributor of software and hardware on the African continent.
“Many small-to-medium sized businesses (SMBs) do not have massive budgets to shell out on the latest software and hardware. So instead, the channel partners can work with vendors to provide tailored cloud applications that will be far more affordable than the software or hardware equivalent, such as a data storage and recovery option, web hosting – you name it. Whatever the customer wants, it can be found in the cloud nowadays, at a fraction of the cost, with almost no setup cost or capital expenditure required.”
Campbell-Young says the other major cost savings of such cloud options are that there will be no hardware upgrades or maintenance and that the cloud service subscription fees are often less costly than the software license fees.
But even after initial cloud adoption, the services of channel partners will still be required, as a recent survey by CompTIA which was conducted in the U.K. has proven.
“Before the survey, many of the participating companies were under the impression that the most difficult part of cloud operations would be the initial stages of deployment of integrating the cloud into their businesses,” Campbell-Young says.
“But the survey revealed that 28% of companies that moved from the first phase of deployment to a non-critical stage of usage discovered that it still required significant effort, and 63% of companies moving on from the full production phase to an IT transformational stage said it also required significant effort and that they required assistance.”
According to a spokesperson from CompTIA, cloud integration may be even more difficult than many other IT projects, because it requires web application programming interfaces (APIs) that might be unfamiliar to the company’s IT staff. And it might be complicated even further if the company had acquired applications without first researching about how it will fit into their company’s overall IT system.
“This means that solution providers will have to stay on hand to ease companies along their journey through the cloud,” Campbell-Young concludes.
