Besides understanding the industry and particular needs that customers may have, there is a particular framework that can be used as a baseline during a sales conversation, pivoting from the Cloud Drivers to the Cloud Blockers. Following I am sharing notes related with a presentation that I delivered three weeks ago to my colleagues in N3 Results Ireland.
A good way to start a discussion is around the challenges the customers are facing:
Now, what drives the adoption of cloud computing? There are lots of little attributes and reasons why
There are three big benefits to consider:
Agility: Both the business side and IT can quickly get what they need as resources, which is a good benefit.
Focus: Whether is IT or the business side, they need to do their real job. For IT it van be adding value as resource. Or, for the business side can be competitiveness.
Economics: The cloud drives a lot of cost savings. There are a lot of studies and research that demonstrate an economic advantage because of the pooled resources at mass consumption levels.
But there are also blockers to cloud adoption:
Security overall. A lot of you are aware of companies who are very reluctant to have their information, data, private competitive edge or IP associated with their business be exposed to any vulnerability.
Compliance. A lot of organizations and enterprises are driven by a lot of regulatory acts and they have to be in compliance with those acts. For example, some countries will not allow their data to leave the country. That can pose a problem in a public cloud environment.
Compatibility. Almost every customer has unique requirements in terms of their business. They have a very unique IT infrastructure, unique set of processes, unique way of partnering with their vendors, etc.
Moving Forward, How we can address these blockers
The next step from here is to know how address customers concerns, and one way is to propose a Cloud dedicated for their company: The “Private Cloud”, in the following presentation includes insights of Microsoft Private Cloud approach.
Dublin Random Notes 