What is the role of partners in a vendor-driven ‘as a Service world?

By John Tan, Data#3 General Manager – Infrastructure Solutions

Digitalisation has changed gear and the shift to Everything as a Service has revised not just the way businesses think about technology purchases and deployments, but also what’s needed from vendors, resellers and integrators. The roles and responsibilities have shifted. Customers adopt ‘as a Service to give them more flexibility in an unpredictable world. It also elevates IT out of its day-to-day role – with time better spent translating business needs and outcomes into technology requirements.

So, where do managed services companies and systems integrators fit? How have their roles and responsibilities – to a vendor and a customer – changed?

One of the objectives of the ‘as a Service (aaS) shift was to simplify the way technology solutions are packaged and delivered. You choose what you need from a catalogue of services, then pay and run only what you use in your environment – making changes as needed to cope with changes in your business.

If only it were always that simple.

While many ‘aaS software solutions can be more easily deployed off the shelf – sometimes with a small tweak or data migration – when it comes to Infrastructure as a Service, the process requires far greater levels of customisation and integration. In fact, the vast majority of customers live in a hybrid world where we will continue to need on-premises or private infrastructure for reasons of security, data protection and compliance. So, how do you decide what applications, what workloads and what infrastructure is optimal to meet your business needs – while ensuring you have the performance, integrations, security, scalability, governance and flexibility that you need?

This is where the vendors have also matured their offerings and become great at presenting their services as “all encompassing” and able to meet your every need. In some cases that may be true, but in reality, most businesses need multiple services from multiple providers – often with the solutions sitting on-premises, in a cloud, owned, leased or aaS.

The critical piece becomes ensuring they all work together to deliver the expected outcome – and this is the role that managed services and integrators have always filled. It’s really no different now. At Data#3, our heritage as a diverse services provider, along with an impressive portfolio of partnerships and accreditations with all leading technology vendors, puts us in an enviable position with a proven model around consulting, implementation and customer success.

Read full article The Role of Partners in a Vendor-Driven ‘as a Service world? – Data#3 (data3.com)