What suggestions do you have for a company trying to go through the transition to the cloud, and are they too late at this point?

No. A provider right now that is kind of sitting there saying I haven't done anything yet, but I need to. Are they too late? No, they're not too late. But I can tell you this, they can't wait any longer. They really have to push hard and fast to get a plan off the ground and get out there and talk to their customers and prospects about it. You can't sit around and delay anymore. The market just moves too fast. Can they get left behind? No question about it. I tell service providers all the time that if you're not talking to your customers and prospects about a cloud solution, somebody else is. I guarantee it.

What are the biggest challenges in that sort of transition?

I think that there are a lot of providers out there that are looking at their business and are saying, 'this is what I've always done, and this is a big change for me, and I see where the market is go-ing, but I don't like where the market is going.' And they only see the downside to it. They don't see the possible upsides. They just have to understand that they're going to have to change their business to stay in business.

What are the biggest hurdles for those who decide that they do want the push to cloud?

There are a lot of providers out there right now trying to make it easy for service providers to adopt their solutions that are cloud-based. I don't see the technical hurdles because I've seen it done very effectively in a turnkey manner. I think one of the issues for a lot of providers is that they have technical people in-house that are afraid of this transition because of what it means personally for them and they put up road blocks. And they make it more technically challenging than it actually is because they are afraid for their own job security.

So you see the transition to the cloud being pretty easy then?

Yes, you could sign up tomorrow to a private labeled channel-only desktop as a service platform and next week you could sign up a client and onboard them. And you don't own any infrastruc-ture as a service provider. You aren't making any upfront investments. You aren't paying to be-come a partner of this organization. All you're doing is understanding what you now can sell, go-ing out and selling it, and once you bring the client on, you start paying, but that's only after you have a paying client.

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