(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — At this week’s Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference 2010, Microsoft (www.microsoft.com) re-newed its commitment to helping service providers deliver cloud services through its software, services and programs, which enable them to become trusted advisors and full-service IT providers to businesses.
Microsoft highlighed market opportunities for hosting and communications service providers, revealing strategies for partners to help them become full-service providers and reduce customer churn, which is a crucial element in revenue growth, profitability and market share.
“Microsoft sees service providers becoming more important as the cloud becomes more predominant,” Microsoft communications sector worldwide hosting general manager John Zanni said in a statement. “Given their experience in deploying and selling infrastructure and software as a service, businesses will depend on them for IT as a service. The next step for service providers is to look beyond their current hosted offerings to become full-service IT providers and trusted advisors to businesses.”
To further understand the impact of service adoption and churn, Microsoft commissioned a study of 695 SMB executives and technology decision-makers in the US and Europe in early 2010. The survey found that SMB customers using enterprise-class email and other online communication and collaboration services change providers half as often as those using basic POP or webmail.
This study echoed anecdotal evidence from service providers who have told Microsoft of the low churn rates among business customers using Microsoft Hosted Exchange, Microsoft Office Live Meeting and SharePoint when compared with those using basic POP or webmail services.
Backup tools, the second most-used IT service among SMB, represents another opportunity for service providers.
To this end, Microsoft partner and unified storage architecture provider NetApp (www.netapp.com) is helping service providers expand their business by developing differentiated services to meet these customer needs.
Through the Microsoft Dynamic Data Center Alliance, NetApp integrated its disaster recovery solutions with the Dynamic Data Center Toolkit, which provides sample code and guidance for building cloud services based on Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V and Microsoft System Center. This gives hosting service providers the ability to offer enterprise-class data protection solutions for disaster recovery, clustered failover, and backup and recovery services to their SMB customers.
As an example of how this is used, cloud computing and managed hosting provider nGenX (www.ngenx.com) was able to work with the Dynamic Data Center Toolkit and NetApp to include enterprise-class disaster recovery in its automated cloud service, Guardian GeoCloud.
“A major concern of cloud computing among our customers is reliability, as downtime or lost data translates to lost revenue, a damaged reputation and halted productivity,” said Robert A. Bye, executive vice president at nGenX. “By integrating disaster recovery into Guardian GeoCloud, we are able to achieve the reliability that our customers demand, providing replication and failover of their virtualized environments to a remote datacenter. Moreover, our customers now have access to a level of disaster recovery and security traditionally only available to large enterprises, at a fraction of the cost.”
With more than 7 percent of businesses in the heavily regulated worldwide financial services industry lacking any backup tools, the opportunity for service providers to provide hosted IT services to SMBs is enormous both in finance and in nearly every other sector.
