Analytical companies and media recorded a rise in the cloud market. Providers and their customers learned that the cloud market is growing by 20-30% annually, and the development of cloud business is ahead of the classical IT market and the distribution market.
The main customers of cloud services in the outgoing year were companies working in retail. It seems that there is no single major player in retail that does not use cloud technologies: companies build their own private clouds, or transfer all infrastructure to a public cloud. It is necessary to note the activity of banks in the field of cloud technologies.
The main trend in Cloud Business is the popularity of hybrid clouds and multi-cloud services. Hybrid clouds involve placing the infrastructure in part on the customer’s premises, partly in a public cloud. Multicolumn services provide the customer the opportunity to share their information system and transfer it to support cloud providers in different infrastructures, which will be synchronized.
In 2017, compared to the previous year, the number of startups aimed at the cloud-based SaaS sales model also increased significantly. In the infrastructure, a serious growth of virtualization continues all and all: virtual switches, routers, virtual storage systems and libraries.
Development of Cloud Business
To grow Cloud Business, like any another, you must follow two principal approaches such as “quality” and “quantity”. These keywords determine only the main focus of the project, what you will most of all pay attention to when building your business. But also there are many other issues you must take into account.
To attain main goals of organizing your business you should follow such tips:
1. Determine the portrait of your target consumers – who they are, how much money they are ready to pay, what they require and are interested in. Check your readiness, relevance and competitive advantages. Make sure that there is your customer there, ready to buy and pay for that money.
2. Determine the problems which your client have, and which one you can solve.
3. Make an inventory of your resources: technologies, solutions, strategies. Think about how to make a product out of these pieces. Right here many Cloud Businesses face the main difficulty.
4. Spot which channels of attracting customers to use, will you work directly or act through partners.
5. Another very important factor is to know if you have any non-market competitive advantages. It is especially important if you want to work with investors. Each investor will try to understand whether you have something that puts your solution above potential competitors.
6. Find some partners that can be useful for you in promoting your cloud service. Many service providers remain without a partner channel, confidently believing that it is not needed in Cloud business. For sure, it is possible to find a number of clients using own forces only. But how scalable is that approach? And how many mistakes and wasted efforts will happen while going this way? Some partners really have a more clear image about the peculiarities of the specific market: which marketing activities have a higher result, what are local specifications of that region, what competitors are present there and what are their weak points. So it is more beneficial to use the experience of others and proven steps while reaching users. But finding the right partners, making agreements with them and even achieving sales growth is not enough. Relations need to be maintained and developed, the effect needs to be measured and analyzed. You must search for new opportunities, influence existing partners, and also look for new ones all the time.
On the early stage of planning your business, it is almost impossible to come to a really successful scheme for the first time. You cannot be sure what approach or business product will be really in demand by those who you consider as clients. Develop some kind of concept, write it down on a piece of paper, go to the client and check it. After building a quick prototype you will see how it works, and then go back and start redoing the model. Without the multiple passages of this cycle, it is impossible to find that unique approach or solution that will really be in demand in the market. On this occasion, Americans have a very useful concept that is necessary to start a business – Minimum Viable Product (MVP). This can be one function that you implement for one client. But at the expense of it, you will learn about the needs of a specific category of customers who need this feature.
The Future for the Development of Technology
Nowadays there is a profitable opportunity for the Cloud business development: the world has changed significantly: other technologies, business priorities, other expectations from clients. Everything is ready for this wave: technologies, infrastructure, professionals, customers, so it is crucial to choose your market and find a sufficient, optimal number of professional partners who will do the first project with you, and then new products, services, solutions, for new market segments.
| Published on Java Code Geeks with permission by Mariia Hepalova, partner at our JCG program. See the original article here: Cloud Business: Its Popularity and Main Trends Opinions expressed by Java Code Geeks contributors are their own. |
