Elly Yates-Roberts |
Business needs are becoming increasingly complex as global service demand shifts from physical to digital.
The pandemic has almost imposed a work-from-anywhere approach, to which partner ecosystems have demonstrated considerable resilience. This transformation has also affected consumers who have turned from commodity customers to customers of choice. Businesses must anticipate the balance this will bring by morphing the two realities into a physio-digital one.
In response, channel partners are becoming service advisors, expanding their product offerings and coupling them with knowledge-intensive workers who understand the value of the 360-degree-oriented solutions. Their sales teams are also transitioning to solution experts that specialise in different industries and product verticals, such as Dynamics 365, Power Apps and security. By investing in such verticals, be it large distributors or value-added resellers with system integration services, channel partners can address significant customer needs, which reinforces loyalty to each other.
Customers increasingly want to be offered strategic and consulting services alongside technical capacity. This combination reduces cloud complexity for the customer since their own market research for different verticals may not always result in appropriate solutions or may require more time. By transferring this activity to their channel partners, customers also achieve operational efficiency. This process is not linear, as it has been in the past. As businesses expand, so do the technological needs for this expansion.
At interworks.cloud, we strongly believe in the power of the Partner Grid. For this reason, we develop a network platform architecture, interconnecting partners and solutions under a unique approach where each member can assume multiple roles. The overarching objective is multi-party cooperation to satisfy dynamic circular customer needs, all based on platform automation. We want to enable partners to turn complexity into simplicity and, eventually, scale up the opportunities for managed services in different market segments by combining valuable cloud services with independent software vendor software-as-a-service solutions into a unique, powerful channel.
Ultimately, such comprehensive cloud solutions minimise the risk of business continuity against rare events. This is the value of decentralised cloud services as a powerful asset globally, rendering on-premises infrastructures obsolete.
Ioannis Vryniotis is senior product manager of platform and vendor alliances at interworks.cloud
This article was originally published in the Winter 21/22 issue of Technology Record. To get future issues delivered directly to your inbox, sign up for a free subscription.