The need for a unique cloud solution bundle and the modern tech buyer
According to Gartner, more than $1 trillion of IT spending will move to the cloud by 2020. It’s time for solution providers to capture a larger share of this market. A cloud bundle strategy will help you get there fast and keep you there for a long time.
When I worked at Dell, custom bundling was core to creating on demand PC. It still is. This is ONE THING that Dell perfected and does really well. The bundling as a concept is not new. We all know about McDonalds Happy Meal and telco Triple Play bundles. Bundling helps companies increase the value of their offering to their customers and immediate convenience by combining the right product mix, retain their customers much longer (lower churn) and in the process increase their profit margins.
Why Cloud Bundle?
To answer this question, let us look at what is going on in the cloud buying process. Customers today are consuming lot of cloud services Ala Carta from AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google, and many other SaaS vendors like Slack, Salesforce. AWS alone provide over 1500 cloud services.
Enterprises are trying to figure out their public cloud and hybrid cloud environments to have the flexibility and control to deploy application where it makes the most business, technical and regulatory sense. They need to address the issues like latency and connectivity requirements for edge and disconnected solutions; data sovereignty, security, and compliance; performance, costs and agility.
It’s not just one dimension when modern tech buyers are looking at these issues to realize their cloud vision. It’s complex and complicated. There are lot of options today to address each of the issues mentioned above. Tech buyers are experiencing that it is painful to find the total solution and manage these cloud services to realize the business outcome they are looking for. Imaging you are a hospital and you have 50 cloud services from multiple vendors. You just had a security incident and now what do you do?
The modern cloud buying and managing process needs to be simple and predictable. This is where the cloud bundle comes in and this is the greatest opportunity for solution providers.
The Modern Tech Buyer
Before we go into the Cloud Bundle Strategy, let us take a look at who the modern tech buyers are and how they want to buy the technology and why a cloud bundle is needed.
According to a LinkedIn research, Gen X, Older Millennials, and Younger Millennials all join the tech buying committee table.
This is HARD DATA from LinkedIn (Thank you LinkedIn Research team!): Millennials are active members of the buying committee. 34% of Younger Millennials (ages 19–25) and 41% of Older Millennials (ages 26–35) already possess technology decision making responsibilities. Among Younger Millennials on the tech buying committee, 61% provide input on a technology product or service purchase or implementing/managing a new technology product or service.
Source: LinkedIn Research
Millennials and Gen Xers want to believe you care. Once of the ways you can show you care is by providing them a tailor-made cloud bundle and create a learning path for these modern buyers the way they want it. You must tailor your cloud bundle offerings with relevant content and insights mapped to job functions, industries and experience levels of these tech buyers. Continue to demonstrate your knowledge of the tech buyer’s business and continue to educate them via your website, social networks such as LinkedIn and via your sales team. This will continue to build trust with the modern tech buyers.
To be continued. Part 2 of this article will cover the top 5 strategies for cloud bundling and why now.
I would love to hear your thoughts on how you are creating and managing your cloud bundles today. Please share your thought with me at anand dot raj at inxero.com.
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