If you’re an IT solutions provider that’s selling or planning to sell cloud services — especially to SMBs — there’s one weapon you need to have in your arsenal, no matter which vertical markets you’re selling to. This weapon can be deployed when you face the price objection of your solution compared to a less expensive consumer-grade cloud alternative.
The last time I talked about the difference between consumer-grade cloud services and enterprise-grade services, I focused on the security differences. If that advice wasn’t enough to completely convince a prospect about the value of using an enterprise-grade cloud service, the topic of data ownership should be.
Cloud backup vendor KineticD put together a great blog recently that illustrates this point concisely, contrasting Google Drive’s Terms of Service with its own. The punchline is this: when you upload or submit content using Google’s cloud services, Google becomes the owner of your data. Google’s terms and conditions clearly outline what that entails, including giving Google full authorization to use your data to “publish, publicly display, and distribute such content.” Sure, it’s nice to have free or low cost cloud services. But, is it worth it to turn over your rights to all your data in the process?
If a prospect doesn’t flinch at this point, you should do yourself a favor and move on to the next one. There are plenty of other prospects out there that are ready to listen and make a logical business decision.
August 3, 2012 at 2:51 pm
If your looking to resell cloud solutions there is much you need to consider and address such as commission plans, which vendors to work with and which model to sell through cloud on.
For information on this in depth consider reading these free and vendor agnostic channel cloud papers at http://www.webroot.co.uk/En_GB/land-reselling-the-cloud-2011.html
Ian Moyse
Workbooks.com