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Why standing still means falling behind.On August 9 2006, Google’s Eric Schmidt described Google’s approach to service-as-a-service (SaaS) as cloud computing, becoming the first high

profile to use the term. Now, the cloud has grown to become the most expansive platform in the world.

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The International Data Corporation (IDC) estimates the economic value of the digital transformation (DX) to be $20 trillion or more than 20 per cent of global GDP with the cloud leading the way. This is a growth rate that has spiked the attention of companies looking to ride the wave of business innovation fuelled by cloud technologies with 69 per cent of businesses already using the cloud.

CAPEX OR OPEX?In the past, the major motivator for cloud computing was the shift from a capital expenditure (capex) model to an operational expense (opex) model, however the benefits of moving to the cloud have since expanded. The everywhere nature of the cloud means education is easily available and choice is greater of an option.

MSPs can dream big, develop their offerings and embrace ongoing needs for more choice within the cloud.

WHAT’S THE FEAR?Tackling the rise in diverse business needs, limited IT resources and small budgets, the cloud not only increases revenue margins but also addresses issues that prevent businesses from keeping up with changes.

Nevertheless, the cloud DX hasn’t come without challenges. Security protocols of the cloud networked paradigm were not always completely understood, particularly around news of hackers targeting and infiltrating popular cloud servers.

Despite these concerns, cloud service providers have managed to recover and implement security measures to help companies improve their current business and productivity and to secure new opportunities and transition more customers.

Some of the biggest challenges of cloud adoption is security, time and costs but the main obstacle today is migration.

Many businesses find the migration of data through the cloud a pain, however countless cloud solution providers have purpose-built tools that enable efficient data migration to the cloud that don’t lead to downtime or create risks for data loss.

Overcoming security and migration doubts that lead companies to prefer to keep their data on local servers, assists customers in finding the right partner and applications for their business, granting safety, saving time and cutting down costs to guarantee business continuity.

FLEXIBILITY FOR ALLIn today’s fast pace hyper competitive environment, companies are expected to be more flexible and efficient than ever.

To become successful in the DX journey, companies need to move from being digitally distressed to digitally empowered through the cloud. One way forward for MSPs to align their strategies with this change is through their bundling services.

The bundling of services together and the automation of billing, support and provisioning, reduces costs and improves operational efficiency. This appeals to specific verticals and segments by offering services all under a single monthly fee.

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The unprecedented opportunity to move to the cloud has hit many if not all industries, fundamentally shifting how businesses attract, delight and retain customers.

/SynnexAU

@SynnexAU

/synnexaustralia

@synnexaustralia

EDITORIAL AND CONTENT Agartu Dinegde CREATIVE Renee Lee DESIGN Stefan Gassner

www.synnex.com.au

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5 building blocks for successful cloud growth

and effective practiceImplementing infrastructure in the cloud enables the shift from performing constant maintenance

tasks to focusing on a more strategic role; one which allows businesses to respond more quickly

to certain needs.

With these five building blocks, MSPs can be confident in their growth

in the cloud.

01BUILD THE RIGHT STRATEGY

As an MSP, is your business model relevant to your customers once they are fully on the cloud? Many businesses approach

the cloud without a clear strategy. This should be the foundation of when deciding to offer cloud-based services. There should be practices in place that will carry managed

services beyond helpdesk and monitoring to raise awareness about the full cloud skillset ranging from budgeting, backup and disaster recovery, website management, security and

compliance planning, software development management, data and network encryption, intrusion detection, ransomware

and more. MSPs should consider how to include the cloud in broader digital strategies including a comprehensive road map

and measurable goals.

02UNDERSTAND WHAT CUSTOMERS

LOOK FOR IN MSPsWhat do customers look for in an MSP?

• The best solution that enables scalability and the effective delivery of goals,

• Being covered in all areas, • Monitoring workstations and servers,

• Cost effective solutions that save,• Ease of implementation and maintenance and,

• Available and useful support.

Through constant analysis, understanding business needs now and into the future is key to keeping up with trends that

are reshaping the technology industry. Tools like the forms application in an Office 365 subscription is a great way to gain

insights on customers and current service offerings. This will assist MSPs in clarifying what needs to be carried forward and

what needs potential rebranding or refocusing.

03PLAN

Disasters often occur when least expected, and businesses need to be prepared for possible disaster emergencies by

implementing planned approaches and services to recover. The specialised knowledge required to deploy, maintain and troubleshoot systems that businesses rely on does not come cheap. For the right customised strategy to be implemented, MSPs must consider the do’s and don’ts, potential risks and

successes of each business by setting an execution plan.

Analysing customer demands and forecasting processes is important in effective optimisation and this should be

performed to prioritise the systems, applications and data that needs to be migrated for successful cloud growth.

04PROTECT

Over 58 per cent of IT and security professionals globally surveyed by Barracuda cited cybersecurity and data protection as their top concern for 2019 however, 65% of respondents did not experience a single security

break over the past five years. Online security, particularly email security, is a priority for all

businesses and with more time spent online through the cloud, this is crucial. As most threats are email born, cloud security

can be widened to ensure the cloud infrastructure is compliant and secure by training users and staff to be diligent. The cloud provides comprehensive and affordable security that responds to needs and elevates the level of service. With the nature of

attacks against SMBs changing, security threats to the landscape means cloud users need to evolve themselves with

a recovery plan.

Once a customer is migrated to the cloud, address key concerns like embracing security tools, identifying network

vulnerabilities and data security loopholes through simulated cyber-attacks, regularly back up servers and seek quality

education on threats to help widen cloud security.

05EXECUTE AND REVISE

Growth in the cloud doesn’t end at migration. Constant communication with customers is essential for

measuring the effectiveness of the processes and systems of cloud migration and to ensure they understand the types of

services available. This is vital for MSPs building their brand and creating opportunities for more business. Continuously

educating customers to nurture a contract, clarify any issues and provide guidance on how to incorporate best practices is the differentiator of successful and effective cloud practice.

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Partners succeeding in the cloud

Michael Tea E-commerce and Cloud General Manger, Synnex Australia

/michaeltea

THE SYNNEX CLOUD MARKETPLACE In 2016, we launched our cloud marketplace with a five-year roadmap to help partners generate new revenue streams through the cloud.

We wanted to do the heavy lifting for our partners who may not have the development resources to build their own cloud provisioning and billing platforms.

We developed our cloud automation platform to help partners build a recurring business model; assisting our partners with ordering, billing, provisioning and renewal management.

We invested in the integration costs with our cloud vendors and continuously enhance our Cloud API’s with new functionalities.

Laying down our foundation and business plan early on, we built a new unique team structure specifically for the new cloud business model. This allowed us to quickly transition and deliver solutions of quality standard to support partners with a wider cloud subscription and consumption offering.

For the last six years, we have maintained our pace of innovation with fortnightly build releases, new features and enhancements.

The Synnex Cloud Platform was built to scale. Now processing well over 10,000 cloud transactions per month, our partners have the peace of mind that our cloud billing engine is built for accuracy to ensure our partners’ finance team can reconcile with ease.

GETTING IT RIGHT AND NEVER LOOKING BACKOur focus was initially on driving our hardware business online and providing better user experiences. Later, our emphasis grew to the integration of the cloud into the same e-commerce platform; enabling partners to transact hardware and cloud through the same instance.

Our technology platform is only one vital segment. Having the right teams, processes, investments and thought leadership is equally as important in our road to drive partner success.

We are transacting well over $100 million per year in online sales and cloud revenue.

Taking a legacy system into a modern model is achievable but can often be met with obstacles, however with our technology and platform, we were always able to find a solution that worked to ensure we delivered and stayed ahead of the game.

TO SCALE YOUR BUSINESS, THERE NEEDS TO BE AUTOMATIONInitially, we expected the uptake to be slow as this was a new business model involving new processes, new compensation plans and new sales enablement training. However, once we embarked on the digital transformation journey within our own business, we were able to illustrate the benefits of upselling and cross selling with cloud solutions.

Since 2016, our cloud business has had over 800% growth and over 1,000 transacting partners.

We are expanding on a regular basis to add more cloud vendor solutions into our offerings that encourage our partners to have a multitude of conversations with their end customers.

WE HAVE DEVELOPED A GLOBAL FIRSTBy integrating finance into our platform, our partners can embark on a service model for anything as a service on a monthly bill, through our recently launched Technology-as-a-Service (TaaS) program.

Partners can bundle multiple devices, cloud and services onto a single bill through one log in.

Synnex TaaS acts as an umbrella; pulling in the hardware, finance, configuration, services, a buy-back program and cloud components with a compelling overarching offering that helps partners close more deals and have greater opportunities to discuss other options with customers.

TaaS is for partners interested in switching from capex to opex, helping companies of all shapes and sizes become more profitable and invest in strategic initiatives that drive revenue and growth.

INNOVATING YEAR ON YEAROur cloud subscription business has grown year on year with double digit growth.

We have already given our development team a roadmap for the next 24-months’ worth of development projects.

In the last few years, we’ve seen the changes in our industry and the fruits of our hard labour to ensure our partners succeed in the cloud.

Being receptive to the changing nature of technology is extremely important to us and with the blend of a great team and sophisticated platform, we are confident in the future of our business.

“

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We are the only solutions aggregator with a partner portal that combines hardware, software, ESD, licensing, cloud and finance into a single partner platform.

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/salilarora

The cloud is no longer a buzzword

Salil Arora Microsoft Cloud Solutions Business Unit Manager, Synnex Australia

The ever-changing IT landscape has seen the cloud become a mainstream motion. The cloud is no longer a buzzword and simply put, cloud is the way customers consume IT today.

The industry has witnessed an ever-growing customer acceptance and adoption of the cloud, resulting in the high demand for cloud services from our partners.

It was a no brainer for us to invest in a cloud practice to help our partners transform their businesses and stay profitable, and at the same time for us to stay relevant to their business needs.

We have been a Microsoft partner for more than 15 years.

Launching into a cloud practise with the cloud solution provider (CSP) program was a natural progression path for us.

CSP was our biggest step forward from the Microsoft portfolio perspective. Recognising that CSP was going to be the program of the future, we were confident the outcomes were going to be positive for our partners and us.

What are cloud vendors doing?The innovation of cloud vendors is creating opportunities for SMBs to grow their practice with new cloud solution offerings that breed value.

MICROSOFT CSPWith over 68,000 cloud partners, Microsoft generate more than 95 per cent of their business through their evolving cloud partner ecosystem. Although not all SMBs have cloud focused sales forces, their primary cloud focus is on selling Office 365, providing helpdesk and managed services as well as building out public, private or hybrid cloud infrastructure through Azure.

According to our March 2018 CSP community survey, SMBs currently using the CSP program for Office 365 and Azure have developed cloud solutions with over 51 customers since inception.

Cloud security is about safeguarding SMBs and Microsoft have an integrated solution that brings together Office 365 with advanced security and device management capabilities; Microsoft 365 Business. Microsoft’s virtual workshop and webinar series provide partners with step-by-step guidance to help start their cloud journey.

For instance, Microsoft’s StepUp webinar. This equips teams to comprehend, adopt and deploy cloud technologies to expand business opportunities and move to the cloud with grace. With Azure Building Blocks; tools designed to simplify the deployment of resources Azure specific, partners don’t need to author any templates and are required to only specify the parameter settings for the resources they want to deploy. These parameter settings are then merged with best practice defaults and deployed using a command line tool.

ACRONIS$19 billion growth by 2024

The Acronis disaster recovery solution is a single data protection platform with auto-discovery and automation. This solution helps MSPs grow revenue from their existing customer base with the ability to pick and choose what a client uses for individual serves or devices. The flexibility of this solution gives the option to bundle services together, back everything up and the freedom to be selective about what is individually protected.

CARBONITEFounded in 2005, Carbonite protects data for more than 1.5 million customers and organisations with over 700 billion files under protection and 60 billion recovered files.

Carbonite Migrate eliminates manual processes by quickly and easily migrating physical, virtual and cloud workloads through creating a replica of data, applications and databases of complete servers being migrated. Without impacting system availability, users can simply switch to, from and between public clouds through Carbonite. This replication maximises efficiency; sending small chunks of data, incorporating multiple levels of compression and enabling bandwidth throttling.

It may seem like a complex and treacherous journey to the cloud, however there are many MSPs who comfortably take customers through the cloud DX following these five building blocks. Each cloud journey has its own story with a common desirable outcome and it is up to MSPs to help customers navigate this changing environment.

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STAYING RELEVANT IS OUR TOP PRIORITY Most of the technology vendors have multiple distribution partners. The products we distribute are the same and can be purchased anywhere. Office 365 for example can be purchased directly from Microsoft or from one of the many Microsoft CSPs.

So why Synnex?

Staying relevant to our partners’ needs and ensuring our partners stay profitable is what we stand for.

We provide our partners with:

• a comprehensive cloud portfolio,

• expert advice,

• assistance with solution design and deployments,

• flexible payment terms,

• access to provisioning and managing cloud services 24/7 through our state-of-the-art portal and,

• access to our technical resources as an extension of their own team.

In a nutshell, making it easy for our customers to do business with us is our top priority.

WITH OUR PORTAL, COMES THE PEOPLE We have been very selective in onboarding cloud vendors. We wanted to ensure that the vendors we onboard and the services we offer to our customers have synergy and we do justice to our partnerships, both upstream and downstream.

We have partnered with leading cloud vendors that complement each other to allow our partners to build comprehensive solutions for their customers.

Investing heavily in our cloud portal, we ensure it is partner friendly and the whole process from provisioning cloud services to billing is seamless.

It comes down to putting it all together in the most efficient and cost-effective way.

The CSP team we have built over the last two years has helped partners with enablement, consultation, solution design and deployments. Having team members who act as trusted advisors to our partners is most important to us.

A TRUE AGGREGATOR Appointed as a Microsoft CSP in 2016.

Although we have a long history with Microsoft, becoming a CSP was not automatically given. We needed to go through a rigorous RFI process, have the right team, systems and processes in place to be granted the Microsoft CSP status.

Once we had this foundation, we went to market with an extensive enablement drive that ensured our existing partners understood the value of the CSP program and the need for them to transform their businesses.

We are a true aggregator when it comes to IT services based on what we bring to the table.

WITH OUR PARTNERS EVERY STEP OF THE WAYOur team work as an extension to our partners’ teams.We work with partners through:• consulting, • technical training, • workshops, • webinars, • customised one-on-one sessions, • scoping, • solution design and • deployment services.

We run enablement programs to ensure our partners have the right know-how and skills to have meaningful conversations with their customers.

Our partners have said they have been able to win deals with the assistance of our team and we take great pride in this.

At the end-of-the day, when our partners win new business and stay profitable, that’s what makes us remain successful. We have seen many of our traditional partners transform their businesses and start selling cloud services and we are seeing more and more of our partners starting their cloud journey.

When a partner finds a new opportunity, they bounce ideas with our team and we work with them to make sound recommendations on the best solutions. If partners require any further technical support, assistance with proof of concepts or for our technical team to accompany them on customer sites; we will go above and beyond to support. This is what makes us unique.

THE CLOUD IS THE LIMITSelling a product for a single digit margin is not going to cut it anymore.

We want to make sure our partners understand the MSP model as the way forward. Through the MSP approach, I believe partners can create value for their customers and remain profitable at the same time.

Our priority within the CSP portfolio is Microsoft 365, which takes Office 365 to the next level and allows partners to offer a secure modern workplace to their customers.

When it comes to cloud infrastructure, Microsoft with Azure is leading the innovation. We want our partners to be able to leverage this opportunity. Azure Reserved Instances, Windows and SQL server subscriptions available under the CSP program are the most cost-effective way to get access to these Microsoft technologies.

Starting our journey on a very positive note, our CSP business has grown tremendously over the past couple of years.

We want to stay relevant to our partners now and into the future.

Our success is the result of having a great team, the partners we are proud to work with and the right execution of our plans. We would like all our transacting partners to embark on the cloud journey with us and help partners during their phase of transformation.

When I look at the way we have grown our cloud business in the last two years, I am confident that the future is very positive for us. The cloud is the limit.

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ONE STEP FORWARD In late 2010, Techware introduced their managed

services strategy. Hardware was still highly favourable in the industry around this time however, Techware recognised the true potential and capabilities of managed services.

They saw a shift in industry trends as key players were selling their products directly to end-users. The end of life trend of reselling only hardware products was near and Techware found they could no longer whole sell to resellers. It was time for them to train up their staff and embark on the cloud journey.

Transitioning from a SMB focus to mainly targeting medium sized businesses across industries, Techware fully transitioned with us into a managed service provider 5 years ago and have never looked back.

THE RIGHT VISION FOR BUSINESS GROWTH

For the family business to succeed in the industry, this meant implementing IT infrastructure that efficiently supported their transition. At first, the Techware staff had a traditional scope and perspective of the cloud transformation.

“Now, all of our staff want customers to move to the cloud because they know the real benefits. There’s less of a burden, issues are minimised, and customers are drawn by the great cost effectiveness of this solution”, says Vivian Sia, Techware Chief Commercial Officer.

“Synnex organically grew as a solutions aggregator, which made the cloud solution stand out to us from others in the market. The Synnex e-commerce platform is easy to order through and if we ever wanted other offerings that Synnex at the time didn’t have, the team would do everything they could to accommodate this. They welcome feedback and we’re confident that the team will take what we say on board – this gives us a sense of loyalty”.

DELIVERING TRUE VALUEInitially, it took some time to sign customers onto

the Techware managed services contract, but once they heavily invested through us, they began to see an increase in customers requesting their services to transitioning into the cloud. Leveraging the power of the cloud, Techware offer businesses with effective solutions that meet specific business needs.

“From the get go, we share with businesses the direction we see them headed and where the future of technology is going. Whether they want to adopt early or later is completely up to them”.

“We don’t force our customers when it comes to the cloud, but we look at their needs and customise our services, so they always stay”, Sia says.

55% GROWTH AND DOUBLE THE STAFF IN 2017

Reducing the need to purchase and maintain on-premise products thanks to the cloud, Techware have lowered their expenses and maximised capital. “When managing the whole network for customers, we really need to have the right tools in place and Synnex enables us to do so”, Sia says.

“We have the target to move 100% to the cloud and this process is already well underway”.

“With any issues we may face, the Synnex team always go the extra mile to ensure we feel confident in what we do. The relationship we have fostered with the leadership team over the years has translated through the outcomes of our projects as the business of our partners continue to improve”.

“For example, when we had over 200 faulty motherboards, the team at Synnex personally intervened and went above and beyond by speaking with our team and partners to help deescalate the situation”.

Embarking on this new season has increased Techware’s exposure to new services and technology they can offer. “It’s like we’re developing into a new company. We’re looking to now rebrand and ensure our brand reflects who we are now and who we are developing into”.

The Rise to the Top

Need to knowEstablished as a family business in 1991, Techware began as a wholesaler, building and assembling PCs with their strong company values of owning the process and result, embracing technology change and treating customers like part of the family.

Synnex has a long-standing partnership with Techware expanding over 20 years; helping them expand and scale.

From humble family beginings, Techware is beating the crowd by transitioning into a powerhouse and

capitialising on the power of the cloud.