Fifteen years ago the service provider market was the place to be. Lots of businesses were making their first moves online, customer acquisition was relatively straightforward and growth was easily achieved. But over the past decade or so most service providers have faced tricky trading conditions, they have had to watch their margins erode as the market matured and consolidated. Some have reacted by focusing on defensive strategies rather than innovation. However the case for innovation in a difficult market has been well-argued – innovation, and the differentiation that follows from it, can flourish when times are tough as people look for an alternative approach, and there are many celebrated examples of this happening with great success in other industries. Fortune magazine, for instance, launched in 1930 less than a year after the Wall Street crash; Diet Coke was launched in 1982 in the middle of a global recession; Apple launched its first iPod in 2001 around the time that the dotcom bubble burst.
Hosting companies and managed service providers are offering cloud services as an obvious extension to their existing business. Telcos, who are battling shrinking voice and data revenues, are heavily pushing their cloud services businesses to their enterprise customers and elsewhere. Large systems integrators are offering a cloud service provider model as more and more of their customers move to the cloud.
However, failure to seize and own the market opportunity through innovation and differentiation is characterizing the service provider move to the cloud. Some service providers are taking little action to build out true cloud services, while others are in the me-too business of attempting to replicate generic services like those provided by AWS. The development of specialized solutions that sit above the infrastructure level is where service providers can differentiate and customize their offers, and where they should be looking as a source for sustainable revenue growth.
A New Journey: The Aggressive, Multi-Cloud Service Provider
Telcos and service providers are now being tasked with continuing to monetize their own clouds while at the same time making the most of other cloud provider’s services. Our new, multi-cloud world calls for aggressive cloud service providers, ones that will make the most of whatever cloud is the best fit for a particular requirement, while providing clear value on top. Just how can service providers do this? It requires access to multi-cloud management capabilities that extend their own cloud while also adding value on top to meet the needs of enterprise and DevOps customers.
Flexiant Concerto offers just this functionality for service providers. When using Concerto, telcos and service providers can be aggressive in the cloud solutions they offer and cater to new services supporting a variety of use cases. Here are just a few examples:
- Flexiant Concerto: How to set up a Ruby on Rails stack
- Flexiant Concerto: How to set up a LAMP Stack and Deploy Your Application on It
- How to use Spark across any cloud with Flexiant Concerto
- Creating a truly elastic Spark cluster with Chef and Concerto
Take a look at Flexiant Concerto to see how it can help you become an aggressive, multi-cloud service provider. Read our 7 Step Guide to Getting Started with Flexiant Concerto, and sign up here for a free account.
