Building Strength Through Partnership

Legacy IT resellers are going the way of the dinosaur in favor of partners who can deliver clear value-add with a track record of transformative success. Specialization is the order of the day. This cuts to the heart of what we mean by a partnership — and how it differs from simply being a “vendor.”

IT partnerships should allow your in-house team to remain focused on generating revenue and building the organization.

Why Specialized Partnerships Matter

Choosing the right partner is absolutely critical to executing a successful cloud transformation. We addressed this in a previous post. Every organization is necessarily limited by its own technical and human resources. The right partner brings expertise, experience, and proven processes to ensure that internal limitations don’t equal a failed transformation process.

A Successful Cloud Partnership

Let’s take a look at one of the most recent and important cloud partnerships: AWS and VMware. AWS brought their cloud platform services together with VMware’s virtualization expertise. The result was a specialized certification program, a robust migration service, a cost insight tool providing greater transparency into cloud spending, and a joint hybrid cloud product to incentivize customer adoption. Each partner brought highly specific value-add services and together they created a game-changing cloud solution for the enterprise.

Partners Versus Vendors

It’s worth exploring what we mean when we talk about being a partner as opposed to being a vendor. A vendor is easy enough to explain: It is a company providing a service. The point is, even the best vendors are not as invested in your success as a partner. They certainly wish their customer success and hope for continued business, but there is no strategic, long-term involvement, or commitment to understanding their clients’ unique business goals.

In some cases, vendors may even push templated or cookie-cutter solutions that simply don’t fit. This isn’t to say that every vendor is out to take advantage of their customers; it’s simply a recognition that a generalized vendor offering tends to be limited, in contrast to a specialized partnership.

By comparison, a successful partnership is a more intimate relationship. In these engagements you’re not just purchasing IT services – you’re working hand-in-hand to grow the efficiency and effectiveness of your IT resources.

Cloud security, migration, and cost optimization are exactly the types of endeavors that call for partners.

The key difference is a subtle but important one — collaboration. It’s often thought that a good partner will “take care of everything” for you, but this is not true, nor should it be. A true partner requires your input to understand how your business defines success, and relies on this data to make informed decisions on the technologies they deploy. It is essential for your teams to be involved in this process, as they will adopt and learn new methodologies and processes throughout the engagement.

It’s not about choosing between vendors or partners. It’s about recognizing where more generalized vendors will fulfill your needs and where specialized partners are a better fit. Simple, straightforward tasks are fine for vendors. More involved and strategic endeavors, however, require a partner. Cloud security, migration, and cost optimization are exactly the types of endeavors that call for partners.

Extending Your In-House Capabilities

IT partnerships should allow your in-house team to remain focused on generating revenue and building the organization. Leaning on strong partners can in effect be an extension of your IT team, expanding your resources and solving problems that may have required additional training or experience beyond the expertise and skill sets of your internal teams.

Cloud security, migration, and cost optimization are exactly the types of endeavors that call for partners.

Keeping your teams focused on their core responsibilities has a highly desirable secondary effect – boosting in-house morale. Not only does this improve the workplace, it makes it easier for you to attract and retain top talent.

Cloud Confidently™

At effectual, we engage you as a partner, not a vendor, which is why we specialize in cloud, and not cloud-adjacent services like data center operations. Our deep experience in cloud enablement facilitates your digital transformation. This includes helping you to determine the best implementation strategy as well as establishing metrics to quantify and measure your success. But our specialization is in security and financial optimization.

The important thing is not to be just technologists, but to be able to understand the business goals [clients are] trying to achieve through the technology.

Cloud is a rapidly evolving ecosystem. AWS rolled out 1,400 new services in 2017, another 800 throughout the first half of 2018, and an impressive number of new product and service announcements during re:Invent 2018. We understand that it can be difficult to wade through these waters to find the right solutions for your business challenges, including your specific security requirements. What’s more, your team is likely already fully committed running core applications and tools. You need a partner who can help keep your in-house team free to do what it is they do best.

RightScale’s 2018 State of the Cloud report found that most organizations believed they were wasting 30 percent of their cloud spend. In fact, the study found that 35 percent of their cloud spend was attributed to waste. We look for ways to help our partners get their invoices under control but also to understand what is driving their cloud costs. Finally, we help organizations properly allocate their spend, ensuring that the right applications, business units, regions, or any other grouping of your business is spending exactly what it should and no more.

We strive to understand your long- and short-term goals by working closely with your organization and provide you with strategic solutions for sustained growth. Interested in learning more? Reach out and let us know what you are looking to solve – we love the hard questions.

Robb Allen is the CEO of Effectual, Inc.

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