(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — In presenting his keynote, “The New Face of Hosting,” hosting business general manager John Zanni noted that the “H” belt buckle (which stands for hosting) is now gold, rather than silver. If outward appearances are any indication, things are getting better for Zanni and his hosting division, and there’s an opportunity for partners to share in that success.
The core of this opportunity lies in building solutions for the small and medium sized business, which research suggests comprises 95 percent of businesses. “Microsoft found that 52% of SMBs revenues have increased year over year — so business is getting better for them,” Zanni said. Of those, 65 percent are using hosted software, and much more want to be using it.
This provides a great opportunity for service providers to meet this demand. Further, they can create a one-stop-shop for these business solutions. “Many of you are becoming complete service providers,” Zanni said to the audience made up largely of Microsoft Partners.
It’s not enough, however, to simply offer services. They must also meet the current needs of businesses.
Zanni outlines four guidelines for services: they must be agile, reliable, accountable, and secure. “If you can provide these four elements you create trust… and when they have that they will never leave you,” Zanni said, only slightly exaggerating. It is true that building a relationship of trust with customers reduces churn to nearly nothing. Also, solutions in the market place make it easier than ever for IT shops to offer services beyond their core competency.
Hosts can use their existing relationships with customers, and offer additional services, “taking over the core line of business applications and running them,” making these customers stickier.
Ways to differentiate from other service providers include forming a special relationship with the client, perhaps because of specific hardware requirements, or even a reliability guarantee. Second, they must provide services that integrate easily and seamlessly in customer environments, as well as leverage existing investments (especially in training so that investment in employees will not be lost when technology changes). Then solutions must be able to scale up or down as business changes, and provide a platform that will meet the organization’s current needs and be capable of meeting its needs in the future.
After doing extensive market research — and hearing that from individuals that they are skeptical of Microsoft’s cloud computing platform, Azure — Zanni notes that Azure is going to open up a huge opportunity for hosts that see its potential. And there have already been examples to prove his point.
Managed services provider Mamut (www.mamut.com) offers CRM, web hosting, accounting and business management solutions for SMBs. And when it came to hosted email, which is not one of Mamut’s core competencies, instead of having in-house servers running Exchange, they outsourced it to Azure. Its email service actually comes from Microsoft’s online services cloud, and is seamlessly integrated into the Mamut end-user experience.
Zanni’s vision is that online service providers will play a huge role in the growth of SMBs and that this presents opportunities for businesses willing to take up the challenge. And in many cases this is best done with the use of partnerships to fill out services to make one-stop-shops for IT. If Zanni’s message has sunk in, perhaps there will be more gold belt buckles at next year’s Summit.
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