Overview: Cloud Technology
One thing that has clearly become apparent is the need for Cloud, with 75% of the fortune 500 moving to a flexible working environment. With the increase in demand to work from home due to COVID the need for flexible remote working and digitalisation accelerated tenfold.
Speaking to a top CTO last week, they made the statement that every business ‘needs’ cloud technology to a certain degree, everyone is on a cloud journey of some description its more about how fast and adaptive your organisation can be to make change. It is not possible for all customers to make the speed of changes needed to gain specific competitive advantage.
SaaS and Cloud technology have never been more prevalent than in 2021. However, in our market too infrastructure and operations leaders (I&O) believe it’s purely a cost reduction play and urge customers to see the whole picture. The Cloud Sales team find that hard to agree with, but everyone has their own opinion.
Henderson Scott tend to agree with a recent Forrester report:
“Moving to the Cloud gives you the flexibility and scalability you need WHILST cutting costs. It enables you to quickly respond to customer demand at a time when digital transformation is accelerating." (1)
Adopting a hybrid cloud model will fit most businesses brilliantly for the next 5 years+ while further adaptations in the marketplace take shape!
Insight: Our Customers
Looking into the ever-changing market or cloud, we see that only the most adaptable of clients continue to strive, whereas others feel the Cloud market has moved too quickly.
"2021 is going to be the year that everyone starts normalizing some of their architecture and the architectural mistakes they made in moving so fast," said David Linthicum, chief cloud strategy officer at Deloitte. We will hit the complexity wall." (2)
Our client base (Cloud MSP’s, System Integrators, Vendors and VAR’s) has on the whole continued to drive year on year growth, with some exceptional performances from businesses that partner heavily within top vendor eco systems. The adoption of flexible working does not only seem to suit more businesses, with large cost reductions in office rent and fees but also the employee who can now operate within a more flexible set up. However it was based on a simple reactive need to reduce operational cost!
One simple explanation is the reaction need to cut costs in response to the pandemic. Clients faced pressure to reduce operational expense, it’s likely that many organizations embraced cloud cost optimisation measures, such as rightsizing resources to align with workloads or eliminating unnecessary cost drivers, that may not have received attention previously. As the largest line item on the cloud bill, compute costs were likely a focus of these efforts.
This is supported by another trend we identified in the data—enterprise organizations showed a 186% increase in purchases via committed use programs, such as Reserved Instances or AWS Savings Plans, in May. These programs offer substantial discounts to on-demand prices in exchange for long-term commitments (this article highlights the differences in discount options by each major cloud service provider). At a time when it became clear that the pandemic would be a long-term reality, many organizations embraced options to reduce compute costs.
“However, this isn’t the whole story. At the same time that compute spending levels decreased, investment in containers and serverless technologies increased, by 38.7% and 13.5%, respectively. This indicates that businesses are increasingly choosing modern approaches when deploying new workloads in the cloud, and will be an interesting trend to monitor in the years ahead.” (3)
Cloud technologies have been a fast and adaptive technology to help a vast majority of businesses during the pandemic.
The battle for top talent: Commercial Recruitment
Gaining competitive advantage in Cloud commercial businesses is always top of the agenda for CRO’s, CMO’s and CTO’s alike, the need to out-perform the competition by hiring top talent is important now more than ever!
With the volume of commercial roles (Sales, Pre Sales, Marketing and Professional services) reaching pre COVID levels earlier this year the market is very positive place. However, with lots of businesses going to market at the same time there has never been such a competition for talent in recent memory.
With great candidates having usually 4+ opportunities/ offers at any one time businesses need to approach recruitment of top talent seriously or be open to missing out!
Top employers, approach the market with a clear and decisive plan when hiring. The noticeable traits of top businesses who successfully get the best commercial talent time after time are:
Drawn out interview processes have become a think of the past- with great technology out there facilitating remote onboarding- our clients have the upmost confidence to hire even in a remote environment. You can still have multiple touch points and stages (ideally up to 3 if there are complex stages) but clients need to be proactive and available throughout the process to secure the top people!
Speed doesn’t just relate to the pace of process - it also relates to the proactivity of the requirement- why battle away internally understaffed until it really starts hurting your P/L, get on top of the headcount issues early and take some of the pain out of recruitment.
To view our current live cloud vacancies click here.
References:
(1) Forrester Hybrid Cloud Strategy (serviceware-se.com)
(2) Predicting 7 MSP trends in technology for 2021 (techtarget.com)
(3) Takeaways from Our New Report: How 2020 Changed the Way We Use the Cloud | CloudHealth by VMware (cloudhealthtech.com)