Consulting Services As A Differentiator

In addition to offering managed services wrapped around cloud services, cloud service providers and their partners are able to extend cloud consulting to end customers, a major differentiator from a hyper-scale cloud provider, the executives said. Cloud service providers with firm footing in the channel are working with partners who have been trusted IT providers to end customers for years, so offering consulting around cloud is a natural extension, according to Stewart.

"What workloads have to have high redundancy, high availability? Which ones do you not mind having a five-hour outage with? Having that conversation with customers, and not just taking an order and doing what they ask, but actually discussing the importance, bifurcating the different applications, different workloads, different sets of information and data, [so we can give] them the best overall solution," he said.