Top 30 Value Add Services that Azure CSP can offer to their customers and include in their managed services offering

My dear all Azure Pre Sales Friends, we are in end of 2017 and in this year we have seen Microsoft Azure market expanded very fast. And now it’s started boiling with fierce competition from all corners. Most of the large deals which has surfaced around the globe are either for AWS or Azure, mostly related to large scale transformation and migration from on premises to Public Cloud. However good news for dedicated Azure Pre Sales folks is that with a Rapid Year to Year Growth MS Azure is growing faster than AWS, and
you must have already experienced that based on the sales leads you got in 2016-17 compared to your AWS Pre Sales friends. There are few challenges from the HCI vendors but those deals are very less compared to the push enterprises are giving to lift their workload to Azure. Many of the large organisations who are facing end of life of their hardware and who are basically are Microsoft Shop, Azure became their lone choice and it was easy also to crack such deals however AWS is still a big player in IaaS market.

If you combine all the three sales pillars of cloud computing which include the IaaS, PaaS and SaaS, Microsoft Azure has reached the number 1 spot as you can see in the following table. Azure market share has grown up to 31% thanks to the O365 offering.

Data Source: Jeffries, Dec. 2017.

Any Azure/AWS deal will also makes lot’s of sense in your company revenue guidance because of the green dollar spend by the customers the TCV (Total Contract Value) will increase significantly. (If you also sale Azure to your customer).

Now to sale Azure your enterprise should become the Microsoft CSP. CSP is a term coined by Microsoft and it stands for Cloud Solution Provider. As per Microsoft the Azure CSP is capable of providing the following solutions.

Fig: Dashboard of a CSP provider at a glance.

Now obviously there are many CSP already who are selling Azure as part of their managed services so no doubt that your solution offering should have some extra edge over other vendors. There are many offering can be made but best in class Azure CSP offering can have the following top 30 components in my opinion.

Here are my list of top 30 services which the CSP can provide to its customers as a part of their Azure solution bundle.

Fig: Top 30 CSP offering

For all the sales guys the things always not go as planned. You may not win all the time, if you lose a deal a horrible feelings may build in your stomach, sometimes you can’t sleep. The reason is that always we are offering the same what others are offering we used to play safe and opportunities pass by us. If you want to crack the deal you must focus on building the Azure Solution offering. For example a repository of PowerShell scripts which do lots of Automation tasks and can be demonstrated easily in a customer presentation can make a difference and you may crack the deal. So it’s always better to re plan the offering so that you can stand out of the crowd.

Many of you are taking at least some time off to be with family and friends during this season and I hope your time off is restful and pleasant. I want to wish the very best from me to you and yours for health and happiness both now and in the coming New Year. I hope this article will help you in the new year when you will be back in business.