The CONTEXT ChannelWatch 2017 Survey reveals that almost 50 percent of global resellers are preparing to offer cloud services this year.
CONTEXT has revealed the results of their latest ChannelWatch survey, which demonstrates that almost half of all global resellers “said they are preparing to sell cloud services this year in a market set to be worth $160 billion (€137.8 billion) by 2020”, although resellers in Europe “tend to lag in adoption” in contrast to those in both Japan and the US.
The survey profiled “views, activities and intentions” of 8,500 resellers “operating across Europe and beyond”. More than 10 percent stated that either SaaS or IaaS was “one of their top three growth areas”, with SaaS seen as “easiest to implement”.
The survey found that the “most popular” cloud services sold were “similar to last year’s report”, with back-up at 53 percent, storage at 47 percent and business apps at 35 percent. But in contrast to last year the survey also revealed “a significant increase” in the number of resellers selling general infrastructure services, “reflecting the fact that 14 percent rated IaaS as a major growth category, just 2 percent behind SaaS.”
The report’s other findings included a decrease in prices and improvement in choice for buyers, due to sizeable “datacentre investments from Microsoft and Google” which “have helped spur competition with Amazon Web Services”.
It also identified the main obstacles to resellers looking to embrace cloud selling services as being “demand not justifying the investment (35 percent), followed by security concerns (19 percent) and complexity (14 percent).”
“As demand increases, so will the need for distributors and vendors to train their reseller partners. Hardware as a Service (49 percent) and SaaS (40 percent) were the two areas where resellers felt coaching would be most valuable”, said Adam Simon, Global Managing Director at CONTEXT.
Finally, the ChannelWatch Survey revealed that the preferred choices for resellers were “Vendor-branded services hosted by the vendor (54%) and vendor-branded services hosted by the distributor (30%)” which demonstrated reseller “concerns” regarding “security, reliability and having a trusted brand to sell.”