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Cloudsultancy is a new role that can service a wide market.
The below diagram is an excerpt from the Cloudsultants' Essential Guidebook - to be released soon.
Until then, please check out Cloud Jumbles at https://www.cloudjumbles.com
Traditionally, people considered quality I.T. consulting as being a generally expensive proposition that can only be afforded by the larger enterprise and provided by the "Big 4" or likewise large "System Integrators". Even though, in many cases, these players all used smaller vendors under them.
This mind-set left a massive market of businesses that have been needing consulting and I.T. services at reasonable cost.
Smaller players may use more SaaS or manage their own basic infra, but these guys also want to grow and need the support to grow.
Enter the Cloud = very efficient PaaS, IaaS and SaaS
Service Providers world-wide generally provide great services and are frustrated by the lock-in that existing vendors have placed upon customers.
This lock-in relates to the legacy method of packaging hardware, software and services delivery where a vendor would be reselling all of these to maximise their benefits, irrespective of the level of benefit derived by the customers.
The key for these vendors was always how best to lock-in the customers and how best to sell them as much as possible, regardless of whether it was truly cost-effective or not.
Most businesses are very interested in consuming Cloud services, but the consumption of these services does not match the goals of the traditional vendors and the big mismatch is that these vendors can not provide such services themselves, let alone try to compete with such service providers.
| Goals | Customer's Goals | Vendor's Goals |
|---|---|---|
| Cost | Lower | Higher |
| Transparency | Higher | Lower |
| Flexibility | Greater | Lower |
| Simple Integration | Greater | Lower |
| Customer's Interests | Maximise own first | Maximise own first |
| Vendor Impartiality | Impartial but influenced | Influence Customer |
Until the time comes, if ever, for traditional vendors to work out how to properly deal with the Cloud, they will do their best to delay their customers' use of it (unless they are involved). They will tell the customer that there are too many security risks, etc. The real risk was that the vendor could see the customer slipping away.
In fact, the greatest problem faced by customers is exactly the fact that they have lost touch in many ways with their own infrastructure as they have relied so heavily on vendors to manage many parts or all of it over the years. CTO's and CIO's spend a lot of their time being wined and dined by vendors and/or managing vendor relationships more than they do actually knowing or directing what is going on. This issue increases as the size of the company increases.
Compound this by outsourcing the engineering work, that is also managed by vendors, and the actual knowledge now is owned and maintained by the vendor - regardless of the knowledge-base owned by the customer.
The following diagram shows how we see businesses evolving with regards to leveraging cloud services and human resources (on-demand SDaaS+AMS), together with Cloudsultancy.
What customers want is a knowledgeable consultant that "gets" the cloud - and can trust them 100% to maximise their interests and wade through the vendors and offerings to bring about the very best solutions and decisions.
This is the role of the Cloudsultant and the breadth of coverage of the Cloudsultant reaches all the way from an SMB all the way up to large enterprise.
We see a future where all major Service Providers have their own Cloudsultants and customers have their own Cloudsultants working for them - either as own staff or contracted resources. This will be a time when Cloudsultants will communicate with Cloudsultants maximising the benefits of the customer first, and where top-notch Service Providers will succeed.
Therefore, Service Providers have a vested interest in supporting and promoting Cloudsultancy to break dead-locks, lock-ins and expand their accessible market sooner.
Please keep an eye out for the release of , "The Cloudsultants' Essential Guidebook".