Cloud storage vendor talks about the missed opportunities SolidFire CEO Dave Wright (below) told last week's Managed Services and Hosting summit in London that service providers and cloud channels generally were missing a lot of business. He showed how his business was built specifically to work with service providers: “We sit behind many of the largest service providers in the world, with 100,000 customers. As a storage company we probably have the largest percentage in the service provider space of any storage company today. So this is an area we know a lot about, and where we work with customers to improve.” But storage is often almost an afterthought in the clouod, he said, with people assuming it was a commodity.
The success of the cloud in some ways causes “analysis-paralysis”, however. where customers wait for the market to shake out, prices to stabilise and getting these customers to move is an issue, he said.
There are many lost opportunities for service providers in this market, he says. There is still a very small percentage of the enterprise workload in the cloud – 70% of enterprises have 20% or less in the cloud. Most enterprises could move into cloud over time, but the main reasons they don't is performance related. And in many cases there is a lack of trust and security issues, but losing visibility and performance are challenges.”
The second missed opportunity is on differentiation - “We see that there are a lot of problems in identifying differences – in many cases customers can't do this and tend to go with brands or names they know. Many service providers are struggling with ways to stand out from the crowd, and in some ways this is limiting their success.”
Work by SolidFire on how the cloud is used shows that it tends to be the lower performance applications in the cloud while the transactional business stays on-premise, which represents a major opportunity.
The third missed opportunity is that service providers are going for the lowest common denominator- meaning that customers are being trained that cloud is simply a commodity, which makes it very challenging on margin. “We find that in storage, service providers are forced to bundle storage at cost or a loss simply to win the overall business. Yet the data is the most important part of any business. This is a huge opportunity to move away form it being a loss leader. Storage does not have to be a commodity.”
It is important to deal with customers preconceived notions as to what is right for the cloud. Service providers have to be able to talk about all the other workloads and applications, in order to uncover the other opportunities.