A State of Cloud #047 — How to differentiate as cloud provider.
During my keynote for the Cloud Architect Alliance, I got a question from the audience : How to differentiate as cloud provider in the world where the Cloud Giants are dictating the market.
One of the mistakes Cloud providers making is trying to compare them self with the Cloud Giants, thinking that they must adapt to their prices for similar services. This statement is obvious bullocks. If you want to differentiate as cloud provider, you must focus on a particular vertical and provide excellence customer experience.
We have seen a lot of players in this field, which didn’t survive. Some of them didn’t survive as the market wasn’t ready yet. Or the services the customer were expecting didn’t match the offering at the cloud provider side.
- Choose your core value(s) and do them better than anyone else.
- Innovate
- Customer centralization
And despite the fact I put customer centralization at number 3. Must this be yournumber 1 ambition. If you respect and listen to your customers need and provide them a innovative solution based on your core values, have you paved to road to success.
Blue Ocean vs Red Ocean
The Blue Ocean strategy is a well known book for management to embrace a strategy how to get attention. And of course like any other strategy has this one some flaws by critics.
In general this strategy could help you attack a well known market. Which is with Cloud Computing is something very difficult as this industry is quite young. A good example is Digital Ocean. This company, and I must admit they are pretty backed up with funds did attack Amazon Web Services in providing virtual servers for small prices with the same functionality as customers are expecting from Internet Giants. Or in the same line, you see filling in the needs for a particular target audience. In this case the Developers. By building up a vertical for this audience they grab a big market share.
Digital Ocean made them self by innovation and customer centralization very popular. By building up a community of developers they have a good foundation against the big players. Where those giants are trying to lure the Digital Ocean customers to them providing them year free of cloud resources, did Digital Ocean work towards a loyalty locked in model.
Green IT as unique selling point.
As we all know is IT very energy consuming for both powering as cooling the infrastructure.
IT is one of biggest pollution for environment. Not only in consumption but also the manufacturing of the hardware.
Greenpeace is one of the organizations which are selecting their Infrastructure partners based on the code of conduct in delivering the best energy saving possibilities for their IT needs. They asking more than the standard element of using green generated energy as supplier. They also ask written confirmation of the carbon footprint of the partners they select. This could be a unique selling point for Cloud Providers. The Cloud provider which is able to deliver the criteria of Greenpeace has one barrier won.
This is of course also counts for other NGO’s which are working with a same type of code of conduct.
Other verticals are financial institutes as well media and telecom. Each vertical has their own need and if you supply their needs as Cloud Provider you can get a market share.
Similar counts for heath care and Automotive. When you provide the solution which enable them to make their work easier, you will have the ability to grow in their segment. Even if you provide a small element in their workflow, will help you as provider to get a bigger share. Naturally you also can combine your services so, you can create a overlap in several verticals. You could innovate in this segment as well.
Lessons to learn
- Choose your core value(s) and do them better than anyone else.
- Innovate
- Customer centralization
Share your thoughts, by posting them here under.
About the author, Marco van den Akker is Cloud Evangelist at Computenext.
A State of Cloud is published every Monday. A State of Cloud is the view of the author, but feel free to comment on the topics or contribute your view on it. Please find overview of the latest post at https://www.linkedin.com/today/author/8002402?trk=prof-sm
