Cloud Management Platforms: A Core Component in Growing Your Managed Services Business
By Amarnath Gutta, Senior Consultant, ISSI
In our work with partners through workshops, auditing, and consultations, ISSI encounters a lot of questions— and sometimes confusion—about cloud management platforms (CMPs). It’s understandable. Only a few years ago, you heard little about cloud management.
That’s changed a lot. The CMP market is growing rapidly and there’s an increasingly large number of native, purpose-built, and third-party tools available. This creates a complex decision-making process for channel partners working with hyperscale vendors such as AWS, Azure, and GCP. Yet it’s not always clear what a CMP is and what it means for partners moving forward.
Let me try to clarify. I’ll start with a definition, and then briefly discuss the main reasons for the recent growth in the CMP market. I’ll talk about how partners can view CMPs not as a cost centers but as revenue opportunities, and I’ll go over the important questions partners should ask about CMPs when they are deciding what tools to use.
What is a CMP: New Tools to Address Cloud Maturity
Gartner defines CMPs as “integrated products that provide for the management of public, private, and hybrid cloud environments.” At a minimum, a CMP should include functions for self-service interfaces and provisioning system images. They should enable metering and billing and provide some degree of workload optimization through established policies.
The diagram below illustrates the broad range of services provided by a CMP. MSPs will typically choose to implement all these services or a subset depending on their market requirements. In the MSP environment, the CMP is the key interface between the customer, MSP, and cloud vendor.
The growth of the cloud in recent years helps explain the parallel growth in CMP tools and solutions. Not long ago, cloud computing was still relatively immature. Organizations wrestled with basic questions such as “What data or workloads should we move to the cloud?” and “How much will it save us?” Businesses grappled with cloud fundamentals; cloud management tools were an afterthought and third-party CMP offerings were virtually non-existent.
Fast forward to today. A lot has happened. The cloud is part of almost every company’s internal conversation, and it’s assumed a critical role – often a mission-critical one – in even the most traditional businesses as the benefits of cloud versus legacy IT become apparent.
Then the Covid pandemic happened. What had been strong and steady growth burst into a hyper-speed phenomenon. It forced almost every business into the cloud. If they wanted to reach customers, they had to be available anytime, everywhere. But with this push to the cloud, something else happened. Companies discovered that cloud computing – just like on-prem IT – could create extra complexity and costs.
Today’s CMP market reflects this reality. Gartner predicts that by 2025, more than 70% of enterprises will have deployed multifaceted cloud governance tools, versus just 10% in 2020. An increasing number of CMP vendors have emerged to address this market need, including Apptio, Centilytics, Core Stack, Flexera, Morpheus Data, ServiceNow. There are traditional vendors who have entered the market too, including VMware, Cisco, IBM, and RedHat. Additionally, some vendors are developing specialized cloud management products to cater to niche markets.
Weighing CMP Options – and the Return on Investment
So how should the channel partners of the hyperscale vendors approach cloud management, and how do they navigate the myriad offerings while weighing the business justifications for investing money and time into creating CMP services?
First, recognize that many customers are facing the challenges of “cloudflation,” including unplanned costs and IT departments struggling to shift skill sets to cloud architectures. While customers may attempt to implement cloud management platforms internally, this often aggravates the complexity and expenses.
That’s when customers start to see that outsourcing CMP tasks to external partners starts to make sense. For instance, if a company spends $40,000 per month on cloud instances, paying a partner a percentage of this to manage its cloud environment makes a lot of sense. Partners can deliver crucial services for a small fraction of customers’ investment in their cloud platform. Typically, MSPs generate a return on investment from the CMP by reducing operating costs with automation and improving customer satisfaction which reduces churn, and new revenue when customers provision additional cloud services.
As the customer starts to demand more than the management of the cloud, the services can quickly evolve from reactive support services to proactive and predictive service offerings that provide clear revenue-generation opportunities. It’s an opening for partners to introduce a range of CMP solutions, from fundamental “keep the lights on” services to high-margin services such as proactive monitoring with self-healing automation and consulting services to help them optimize their cloud environments.
On a related note, partners should also keep in mind that Microsoft and Google Cloud now require CMP services as part of their partners’ MSP certification process. Other cloud vendors may follow suit.
Deciding on What Tools to Invest In
With all the CMP options available, how should partners decide on which tools to invest in?
It’s a question I hear a lot. In a way, it’s the wrong question to ask.
First, partners should consider the service offerings they intend to provide to their customers. They should think about whether reactive or proactive support is required, if support for multi-cloud or single cloud environments is necessary, and whether management of any on-premises environments is involved.
Next, the partner should determine if CMP functions need to be addressed either with specific tools or through an integrated platform-based tool that meets the requirements. An effective CMP deployment must encompass key functions such as ITSM and ticketing, provisioning and orchestration, financial management, resource management, and security management. It is imperative that partners determine the appropriate level of service offering that is relevant to their target customers.
CMP tools can be selected based on the specific functions required to support a particular service offering. For example, it may be possible to address all of a customer’s needs with just two or three CMP tools. In such cases, integrating the tools becomes a more important consideration for partners. Not all CMP vendors provide API-driven solutions, so integrating CMP tools from different vendors could be a time-consuming process that takes several months to complete. However, once the integration is successfully accomplished, the partner will have a robust CMP solution to offer to their customers.
Another approach is to build a CMP tool in-house, though that requires time, resources, and investment commitment as well as a software development mindset to achieve the required CMP solution.
I’ve personally encountered partners who have taken a smart approach with CMP tools. To cite one example, a European cloud MSP had offered cloud management services to public sector customers for over a decade. However, with the rise in cloud adoption and the need for more robust governance and compliance frameworks, the partner needed to enhance its service offering due to customer demands. The partner evaluated a new CMP platform that offers a range of cloud governance services, including the development of customized governance policies and procedures, continuous monitoring of cloud environments for compliance violations, benchmarking against compliance standards, and the implementation of access controls and encryption mechanisms to ensure data security. The new CMP platform helped the partner strengthen its cloud compliance service offerings to public sector customers, which bolstered existing relationships while attracting new customers.
Partners are strongly advised to take advantage of this evolution in CMP technology. As the cloud market continues to mature, cloud margins are becoming increasingly flat. By incorporating CMP services that use comprehensive, well-integrated tools, partners can scale their business without having to rely on significant manual labor.
To learn how ISSI can help in the assessment of your current toolset and provide recommendations on the future state of world-class CMP platform please visit:
Cloud Management Platform Analysis and Implementation
Alternatively, please contact sales@issi-inc.com
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Developing the Right Service Portfolio for Your Business
By Ram Singlacher, Senior Consultant, ISSI
One of the most vexing problems for partners working in the hyper-scale cloud industry is determining the ingredients of their service portfolio. Finding the ideal mix of solutions and products will obviously have a big impact on a partner’s sales and long-term revenue. However, it can be difficult to identify the right set of offerings that appeal to customers while being properly supported by in-house talent.
While running consulting sessions and workshops, I’ve spoken with many partners who have voiced frustration over this challenge. Their end goal, of course, is to grow the company’s customer base, but it’s common to hear stories about businesses investing time and money in specific solutions, only to find they went down the wrong road.
It’s ultimately up to each organization to find, land, and retain customers, however, there are effective ways to think about a service portfolio that will help establish a foundation for creating and maintaining a solid customer base.
Let’s look at some of the common misunderstandings that get in the way of achieving this, and some high-level recommendations that ISSI makes for thinking differently about it.
Building Solutions Before Knowing the Gaps
The hyper-cloud industry is huge, complex, and always moving at a fast pace. There are literally hundreds of products offered by the big cloud providers and many, many dozens of potential customer use cases, from the very common to niche needs. It is simply not possible for any partner, regardless of size, to succeed and grow in this industry by trying to assemble a service portfolio to match the size and complexity of the market.
Yet a common pattern I see is partners jumping in too quickly to build solutions before they gain a deep understanding of their in-house capabilities and how that might map to business opportunities.
It’s understandable. There’s often pressure from the major cloud providers to meet customer demands, which can change frequently. That can create a lot of FUD – fear, uncertainty, doubt – among partners as they try to keep pace with demand and one step ahead of their competitors.
FUD can also result from over-saturated media coverage and the voices of industry analysts. Today it’s common to encounter daily media reporting of AI and machine learning. But if you try to dig deeper into what exactly is going on with these technologies and customer plans for using them now and down the road, it’s not always clear. The blizzard of hype, though, can push partners to feel like that have do something in response.
Analyst firms don’t always help either. Even big analyst names that anyone would recognize frequently produce reports that are just a 40,000-foot view of a technology or trend with little to say about what’s happening on the ground.
Building a Solid Foundation
Some partners manage to build a great service portfolio with a strong connection to what their customers want. In my experience, this typically happens with startups and small companies that have a very focused—and often limited—set of offerings that is tied to an intimate understanding of what their customers need. A common theme is that these companies got their start by working with one or just a few customers with specific needs, gained deep knowledge as a result, and thus grew their portfolios and business.
Getting to that point is a bigger challenge for established companies. One growing trend we see is that very large organizations, particularly telcos, are gradually getting out of the hyper-scale cloud business due to the resources required to make those parts of their companies profitable.
However, it’s a big market that presents enormous opportunities if you carefully think through the development and long-term management of your service portfolio.
In my experience, it’s helpful for partners to go through a deep dive to better understand their own resources and business scenario. This can include identifying business assumptions and goals and taking a close look at in-house skill sets. I also recommend evaluating factors such as the personnel who will support the end-to-end processes involved in building a range of offerings, from initial development through sales and customer support.
Companies might look at this and think, “We’ve already got this covered.” However, the process of doing a detailed gap analysis, followed by a rigorous discussion and roadmap sessions, are always revealing.
For example, I worked with a partner that has a multi-national presence. They had smart representatives working hard in different countries and came to our workshop armed with marketing slides that seemed impressive at a first glance. But during the workshop, a deeper probe revealed that their geographically separated sales and technical people were not aware of what their colleagues in other countries were working on. Moreover, a technical dive into their capabilities revealed gaps between what their marketing slides said and what the company was actually delivering.
The combination of rapid growth and geographical dispersion had created a real disconnect within the company. Bringing this to light was a revelation for the organization’s management team, and they made changes to bring the entire staff back to the same strategic page.
Each company is going to have its own unique circumstances – executives, developers, sales, and a level of drive that will affect the organization’s ability to land customers and grow the business. Getting an understanding of what the company is good at so it can build a service portfolio that fits its business is the first step towards successful growth.
To learn how ISSI can help you determine the right service portfolio for your business, please visit:
Alternatively please contact sales@issi-inc.com
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How to Differentiate Your Cloud MSP and Cloud Services Company
By Barry Turner – ISSI Head of Global Marketing & Senior Consultant
Why differentiate?
The cloud consultancy services and managed service provider (MSP) markets become more crowded each year with new entrants and new services from existing cloud partners. This drive for market share is fueled by the growth in the use of public cloud, which is widely forecast to continue growing at a compound rate of 13%+ for the next four years. There has been significant growth in the number of channel partners of the hyperscale vendors AWS, GCP, Microsoft & Oracle. All of which are providing consultancy & managed services. This has resulted in the companies looking to use these services being faced with an array of choices, many of which look very similar. The question of how to differentiate becomes more urgent each year. Adding to this complex mix is the ever-increasing customer expectations, which evolve as the customer’s cloud maturity develops with experience.
When companies successfully invest in differentiation the benefit is demonstrated in the financial results with significantly higher margins and higher levels of customer satisfaction.
How strategy helps
Differentiation starts with a clear strategy defining how to develop your MSP business over the next three to five years. When this foundation is missing, explaining to your customers why they should prefer your services rather than the competition becomes ever more difficult and often ends up with a discussion on price.
Differentiation models relevant to the Cloud MSP
In working with cloud MSPs and consultancy customers across the globe ISSI has identified five differentiation models that work for partners. These are shown in the diagram below:
Specialization, Market vs. Technology
Market specialization is typically where the cloud partner focuses on a small number of vertical markets such as finance, the public sector, or manufacturing. The second market specialization is where a horizontal market is chosen such as small and medium businesses (SMB). In both cases making these choices enables the partner to differentiate the company by packaging services specific to the market and investing in market-specific employee expertise. One example of service packaging is providing defined scope & fixed-price professional services to the SMB market. This encourages smaller companies with limited budgets and low cloud skill levels to invest in what is perceived as a lower-risk and lower-cost option. Where the chosen strategy is to focus on a specific vertical market e.g. the public sector, investing in employees is critical. Ensuring that staff can operate successfully within the public sector culture, operate the procurement processes, and demonstrate that they understand the customer’s requirements and concerns will go a long way to setting the company apart from the competition.
Technology specialization is where the company focuses on one or a small number of specific technologies. Typically this takes the form of a specific application vendor such as SAP, Oracle, or Microsoft Dynamics within the ERP market. Alternatively, the focus can be on a generic technology such as data analytics. This method of specialization is typically the result of investment in processes and skills in a technology where additional expertise over and above the standard cloud architecture and operation competencies is required. ISSI has a customer that focuses exclusively on data analytics, primarily for three vertical markets where this is perceived as critical to success. This clear strategic focus has resulted in well-above-market growth over many years.
Developing intellectual property (IP) usually takes the form of process automation, software development, and productizing solutions. Data released by Microsoft in 2023 indicates that partners that invest in developing IP generate margins that can be up to 20% to 30% higher than for professional and managed services. The examples seen in the market include managed service operation automation enabling service provision with a reduced headcount, and improving service quality by reducing errors. An example of service productization is a cloud MSP that provides users of mainframe computing models with a cloud migration methodology and a monthly subscription commercial model.
Partnerships
Partnerships usually take one of two forms either working with a company that has complimentary skill sets or including third-party technologies to provide a custom solution. The first method is used extensively by cloud MSPs to augment their capabilities two common examples are working with a specialist security provider and working with database specialists. This can often be used in the initial phase of providing a service to evaluate the market potential. One ISSI client used this model with security services and once the market viability was established the services were moved in-house. The second form of partnership is where complimentary vendors are used to enhance the cloud solution. Usually, this is either with specific technologies such as firewalls and networking or more process orientated such as a cloud management platform (CMP). Independent software vendors such as Morpheus Data market a CMP that enables a cloud MSP to develop a set of services specifically for their customers.
Customer relationship
In his book “On Market Planning: understanding marketing plans and strategy” Malcolm Macdonald argues that the most effective long-term differentiation is derived from the customer relationship. A managed service relationship is very much a marriage, the two parties are interdependent on one another in a long-term relationship. This relationship has many parties involved across the two companies from the operational levels to the executive, providing the managed service provider with a unique opportunity to differentiate based on the depth and breadth of customer engagement. A key component in making this operational is the concept of Customer Success. According to Gainsight, a company that provides specialist Customer success software:
“Customer success is a business method that uses your product or service to help customers achieve their objectives. It’s relationship-focused client management that aligns your customer with your company’s goals—igniting beneficial outcomes for everyone involved.”
Cloud consultancies and MSPs that invest in customer success typically benefit from increased customer retention, improved customer satisfaction, increased revenue opportunities, and improved brand image. To find out more about customer success please read the four blogs on developing a Customer Success practice on the ISSI website
Accreditation and certification
The final method of differentiation is the use of vendor and third-party accreditations and certifications. Accreditations such as ISO 27001:2018 and the Microsoft Azure Expert MSP demonstrate to potential customers a deep level of process and organizational capability. This can also be extended to include employee certifications. Investing in and encouraging staff members to take certifications such as the AWS Solutions Architect demonstrates to prospective customers that the appropriate skills are available. Several ISSI customers use accreditations and certifications to differentiate, one example holds five ISO and many vendor accreditations to demonstrate a high level of competency to the target verticals. The most commonly sought accreditations are shown in the diagram below:
Summary
Differentiating your company in an increasingly competitive market is usually an iterative process that develops over several phases as the company’s strategy evolves and matures with time. The starting point is often the ad hoc development of a specific service or capability in response to a customer requirement. What sets aside the companies that maximize the opportunity this creates is strategy development. To find out how ISSI can help you with this process please visit the service catalog here.
Barry Turner is ISSI’s Head of Global Marketing & Senior Consultant. He has 25 years of service creation experience working with telecommunication and cloud service providers across EMEA on behalf of ISSI, Microsoft, Cisco, Mitel & Agile Programmes. He currently holds ITIL V4 Foundation, and ISO27001:2013 lead auditor certifications and is PMP certified.
References
| Sherweb.com | How to identify key competitive differentiators for your MSP business | https://www.sherweb.com/blog/partner/identify-key-competitive-differentiators/ |
| Microsoft | Differentiate to stand out | https://download.microsoft.com/download/4/8/5/485F15ED-D21B-42C8-84BD-A20FC572D4DF/Modern-Partner-Series-Part-2-Differentiate-to-stand-out.pdf |
| Malcolm MacDonald | On Marketing Planning | https://www.amazon.co.uk/Malcolm-McDonald-Marketing-Planning-Understanding/dp/0749451491 |
| CloudBlue | How to differentiate your MSP business | https://www.cloudbluepsa.com/blog/2017/07/differentiate-msp-business.html |
| Strategyzer | The value proposition canvas | https://www.strategyzer.com/canvas/value-proposition-canvas |
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Project Plan Vs. Success Plan Vs. Adoption Plan
There are differences and this is when to apply them
By Jonathan Lee – ISSI Customer Success Practice Lead
Customer Success Practice Blog Series #4
Having the opportunity to review and audit many company’s Customer Success practices and capabilities, I realized that many organizations are confused about Project, Success, and Adoption plans.
Therefore, I will focus this blog on the differences between Project Plan, Success Plan, and Adoption Plan, what exactly they are, why they are different, and when you apply them. The organization needs to understand the difference between them so that they are using the right “Plan” at the right place.
Let’s first examine each of the plans on its own.
What is a Project Plan?
A project plan[1], according to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK), is: “a formal, approved document used to guide both project execution and project control. The primary uses of the project plan are to document planning assumptions and decisions, facilitate communication among project stakeholders, and document approved scope, cost, and schedule baselines. A project plan may be summarized or detailed.
Project Management is a long-established practice; the person managing the Project is called a “Project Manager” (NOT Customer Success Manager). The project manager creates the project management plan following input from the project team and key project stakeholders. The plan should be agreed upon and approved by at least the project team and its key stakeholders.
What is a Success Plan?
While the Project Plan is used to ensure the smooth implementation of a project, a Success Plan is used to document the customer intended business outcomes of the subscription, how the outcomes can be reached, the timeline, resources required, etc.
As defined by SuccessCoaching [2], the Success Plan is a blueprint for documenting the customer success journey. The plan should highlight the customer’s goals, pain points, and expectations, as well as measures of success.
It should contain 4 main sections
- Where is the customer now (this is the baseline)
- Where does the customer want to go (this is the intended outcome, preferably defined via SMART KPIs)
- When does the customer want to reach their goals (This state the timeline)
- How does the customer want to get there (This captures the activities required)
The specific format of a Success Plan varies from organization to organization; Cisco Systems, Google, etc., have their specific format to capture various information. As an example, I will highlight a vendor-neutral template from SuccessCoaching [3].
It is a single-page plan that captures a wide range of information; the most critical among them are Objectives, challenges, milestones, actions & dates, and success criteria.
What is an Adoption Plan?
The adoption plan is technically part of the Success Plan (sometimes people use it interchangeably with Success Plan or Customer Success Plan).
An Adoption Plan (or Technology Adoption Plan) is a plan to increase user adoption of new technology. This involves training employees, encouraging a digital-friendly culture, and minimizing the disruption caused by new technology [4]. It serves as a roadmap for guiding the customer toward full product or service adoption.
They sound almost the same
The Adoption plan has a more specific purpose: to define the specific “Adoption actions or activities” to be taken.
Adoption is effectively managing the change from how the customer organization used to be before to how the customer’s organization needs to be after the implementation [5]. Hence, the Adoption Plan can perhaps be better explained as a “Change Management” Plan.
Like Success Plan, Adoption Plan is a comprehensive topic and will not be covered in detail in this blog. Instead, I would like to highlight a framework with 3 common adoption activities categories as described by Rick Adams in his book – Practical Customer Success Management: A Best Practice Framework for Rapid Generation of Customer Success [6].
- Communication activities
- Training activities
- Support activities
A pattern I have seen across many organizations is associating the adoption activities with just “training.” It is the most obvious activity and critical but by no means the only activity. Communication should be the first activity to occur. It should be used at the start to inform everyone about the upcoming change and help to prepare them for the change ahead of time. Communication content includes what the change is, why the change is needed, who is affected, when, etc. Various channels can be used, such as – emails, intranet posts, posters, face-to-face meetings, town hall meetings, virtual meetings, etc.
Training is easily understood, but there are various ways of execution – informal, formal, workshop style, customized content based on persona, etc.
Equally important are the “Support activities,” which help sustain and reinforce the changes post-implementation and training. Examples of these activities include FAQ, on-demand eLearning module, video tutorial, help desk, mentoring, the appointment of a Change champion, etc.
Why are they different and when do you use which one?
Each plan is designed and created for its specific purposes. Mapping them on a timeline scale of the LAER model provides a better perspective on how they fit together
Just like a Project Plan is used to ensure the smooth implementation of a project, a Customer Success Plan (CSP) (AKA Adoption plan or Success Plan) is used to document the customer intended business outcomes of their new service and the related adoption activities. The CSP should capture the current baseline, the intended outcomes, the timeline, and an adoption plan to support the usage of the new service that leads to the realization of the outcomes. The adoption plan could include activities such as “knowledge transfer,” use case workshop, communication plan, etc.
The Customer Success Plan is becoming an integral part of the project implementation (especially subscription-based); Cloud vendors such as Google are now requiring their Managed Service Partners to have a Customer Success Plan as part of their post-migration excellence process.
The table below further clarifies the differences and applications of the various plans.
| Purpose | Content | The person executing the plan | When |
Project Plan | To guide project execution & control | Project schedule based on time, scope & cost | Project Manager | Land to onboard phase |
Success Plan | To document the intended outcomes and guide the activities to achieve the outcomes | Success blueprint based on – baseline, business outcomes, KPI, high-level activities, milestones, etc | Customer Success Manager | Onboard to Adopt to Expand phase |
Adoption Plan | To document the detailed activities needed to support the outcomes | Change management plan based on communication, training, and support activities | Customer Success Manager | Adopt & Expand phase |
Summary
In summary, the project plan is used during the Land phase of the LAER model. Once the Project is completed, the project plan ends and the project manager has completed the task. The Customer Success Manager then takes over and uses the Success Plan to document and guide the customer through the rest of the Lifecycle phase – Adopt, Expand, and Renew. Within the Success Plan, a more detailed Adoption Plan can contain the specific activities/actions required to drive the Adoption. Depending on the scope, this would be owned by an “Adoption Specialist”. (Note that while the Customer Success Manager is mapped to manage specific accounts, Adoption specialists focus more on the specific adoption project and are usually more technical subject matter experts. While the Customer Success Manager performs more of a management role, Adoption Specialists are the ones implementing the work, such as training).
I see more IT vendors, such as Google, requesting “Success Plan” and “Adoption” activities in their accreditation programs. Many of their Partners struggle to provide the right plan, resulting in undue delay in their accreditation progress and ineffective Customer Success execution.
To learn more about creating relevant Success and Adoption Plans, refer to our Customer Success enablement workshop – https://issi-inc.com/customer-success-best-practice/ or contact us via email at sales@issi-inc.com
Jonathan WM Lee is the Customer Success Practice Lead. He holds the following certifications – Prosci Certified Change Management, Cisco Customer Success Manager, SuccessCoaching CCSM Level 1 & 2, Microsoft Services Adoption Specialist and has extensive experience of over 100 engagements in training, consulting, and auditing of Customer Success programs, processes, and tools. He co-authors the Cisco Advanced Customer Experience Specialization Checklist and Juniper Networks Business Model Transformation Blueprint/Playbook. He has previously spoken in the ISSI-TSIA webinar on “Identifying Strengths & Gaps of your CS Practice.” [7]
References
[1] Project Plan Definition – Wikipedia
[2] Success Plan definition – SuccessCoaching
[3] How a Single-page Success Plan produced Big Customer Value – SuccessCoaching
[4] What Is A Technology Adoption Strategy & How To Spot A Good One? – Digital Adoption
[5] Adoption is the successful management of change – Pg 115, Practical Customer Success Management – A best practice framework for rapid generation of Customer Success – Rick Adams
[6] Step 5 – Determine Communications, Training, and Support Requirements – Pg 143, Practical Customer Success Management – A best practice framework for rapid generation of Customer Success – Rick Adams
[7] ISSI-TSIA webinar on “Identifying Strengths & Gaps of your CS Practice.”
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How to Get Started with a Cloud Center of Excellence
In our previous blog post, we talked about the key signs that your company should establish a Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE). If you’re facing stagnant growth or problems in scaling your business, a CCoE can create a flywheel of business success by supporting innovation and scale in the design, delivery, and support of cloud services. A CCoE can reduce or eliminate team silos and help cross-team collaboration by aligning teams and resources at a company-wide level. And a CCoE can help you recruit and retain quality cloud talent in a competitive market by demonstrating a commitment to cloud growth and excellence.
Regardless of your company’s size, organization hierarchy, or geographic reach, there is always a need for a centralized body of knowledge that will be used to make decisions, decide strategy, shape governance and policies, and guide best practices. A Cloud Center of Excellence serves as that body of knowledge. And equally important, having a CCoE is increasingly a requirement for companies – especially managed service providers – that want to do business with the major hyperscale cloud providers.
So, what are the basic steps to consider when implementing a CCoE? We’ll first discuss the essentials – who needs to be included in a core CCoE team – and then will talk about the less tangible but equally important task of getting organizational alignment and executive support.
Building a CCoE Team for Planning and Execution
An effective CCoE touches the entire organization, from the creation of business-growth strategies, to the way it communicates with customers, to how internal teams collaborate. Because of this, the CCoE needs to be planned, supported, and managed by employees representing at least a half-dozen skill sets across the company. They need to be selected carefully for the motivation, demonstrated competence at their own jobs, and the time-management skills required to dedicate part of each work week to CCoE tasks.
The most effective CCoE teams we have seen in our consulting practice are usually comprised of employees from professional services, sales, solution design, marketing, delivery and support, and human resources. They operate within a CCoE structure that includes an all-up cloud business office that is responsible for strategy and aligning with the company’s goals. Beneath the cloud business office are teams that support and promote cloud evangelism and adoption activities; security and governance; service management; customer engagement; products and services; and talent management.
CCoE teams also help define and enforce standards and best practices, from daily management of cloud workloads, to implementation of governance and security policies, to creating service catalogs and enabling internal digital transformation.
Getting Buy-in from Executive Leadership
In our experience, the companies that seem to understand the need for a CCoE yet fail to implement them typically share one common characteristic: They do not gain full buy-in and ongoing support for the CCoE from executive leadership.
This point is hard to overemphasize. A CCoE makes a lot of business sense when viewed as a hypothetical in conversations or in presentations. It can bolster long-term business success by becoming the locus for a cohesive corporate strategy. It can help eliminate internal silos, improve internal and external communications, and it can dramatically improve customer service.
But it takes time and resources to build – often many months or longer. And it requires a commitment from top executives that it will be a permanent feature of the business. They need to understand that it’s just as important, if not more so, than having an Accounting or Sales team. A successful CCoE will only work with strong, consistent, and vocal support from senior executives who understand and enforce the importance of the CCoE to the entire company.
Examples of Making a CCoE Work – or Not
We’ll provide two brief examples of this principle at work.
The first is a smaller cloud partner. Their entire business is based in the cloud, and they were working towards becoming a managed service provider. They had a strong roster of skilled solution architects with deep knowledge of AWS. But they lacked consistent, documented, and repeatable processes. The result was a lot of re-inventing, which cost them time and money.
Following some strong recommendations, they implemented a CCoE. And they did it well, with strong leadership support. The CCoE helped them onboard customers faster and identify process bottlenecks more quickly. Plus, it gives the entire company—including leadership—a much clearer view of what they have sold versus what they actually deliver. By the time they got through an ISSI-conducted audit, they were already seeing the benefits of the CCoE.
On the other hand, we know of larger companies that have seen the overview of a CCoE structure. They seem to understand the benefits. Yet we’ve encountered multiple instances of companies where six months or even a year later there is little or no movement towards implementation. It is clear that in most or all of these cases there was not strong executive support.
For cloud partners to succeed in this market, a CCoE becomes more than a nice-to-have. It’s an imperative for business success.
To learn how ISSI can accelerate the development of your cloud center of excellence please visit:
https://issi-inc.com/ccoe-development/
https://issi-inc.com/ccoe-best-practice-sharing/
Alternatively please contact sales@issi-inc.com
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Building Blocks of a Customer Success Practice
By Jonathan Lee – ISSI Customer Success Practice Lead
Customer Success Practice Blog Series #3
As mentioned in my previous blog posts, building a Practice is a rather comprehensive process and many organizations have underestimated the complexity. I would like to focus this blog on the building blocks of a Customer Success Practice.
In my earlier blog post [1], I advocated looking at the Practice in 3 main building blocks – Business, Process, and Tools. Borrowing the analogy created by Pat Bodin and Robert Schaffner [2] in their book “Get in the boat – A journey to relevance,” I will associate 3 building blocks of the practice into the following:
- Captain (Strategy) – Business domain
- Hull (Tactical) – Process domain
- Engine (Operations) – Tools domain
Captain (Strategy) – Business block
Similar to the captain providing the direction to the boat, a Practice needs to start with a Business Model. Without a proper charter/strategy/business plan, it will affect subsequent actions such as an investment plan, resources, tactics, etc. As Kenichi Ohmae also said, “Rowing harder doesn’t help if the boat is headed in the wrong direction” [3].
There are 3 major components in the business domain – Charter, Executive Sponsor, and Business Plan.
The charter defines the existence of the practice; it captures the mission and vision and moves away from being an afterthought. More importantly, it provides internal alignment – clarifying the role of Customer Success and ensuring a focused effort, bringing different teams together.
Complimenting the charter is the need to have an Executive Sponsor. Executive Sponsor provides the link to the organization’s leadership, owns the accountability, and ensures that the practice is supported with the necessary investment, direction, guidance, and alignment.
Last but not least, the high-level charter needs to be translated into an “executable business plan” with goals/targets, a financial funding model, resources investment, a Go-To-Market plan, tactics, etc.
Hull (Tactical) – Process block
The hull supports the entire ship and provides a means to reach the destination. A documented process is the “hull” of the practice.
As Customer Success is a relatively new methodology, there is a need to create a new set of playbooks to define the Land-Adopt-Expand-Renew (LAER) process. The playbook should include a detailed hand-off between the different teams at the different stages of the LAER model; this can be in the form of Swim-lane, RACI chart, flow chart, or any other representations.
Just like a Project Plan is used to ensure the smooth implementation of a project, a Customer Success Plan (CSP) (AKA Adoption plan or Success Plan) is used to document the customer intended business outcomes of their new service and the related adoption activities. The CSP should capture the current baseline, the intended outcomes, the timeline, and an adoption plan to support the usage of the new service that leads to the realization of the outcomes. The adoption plan could include activities such as “knowledge transfer,” use case workshop, communication plan, etc.
The Customer Success Plan is becoming an integral part of the project implementation (especially subscription-based); Cloud vendors such as Google are now requiring their Managed Service Partners to have a Customer Success Plan as part of their post-migration excellence process.
Engine (Operations) – Tools block
The engine propels the boat and accelerates the journey toward the destination. Similarly, Tools help to automate and optimize the Customer Success operation.
Tools are used in every aspect of the IT operation, from the ITIL processes to the IT monitoring to customer management through CRM. Hence, it is no surprise that Customer Success has its own set of tools to support and scale the operation.
In the world of Customer Success, the Customer Success Manager (CSM) uses a “Customer Health Score” to understand the health of the customer account and provides an assessment of the likelihood of renewal, the potential for Expand, and customer advocacy. The Customer Health score is a dashboard of subjective and objective metrics such as license usage, subscription traffic utilization, golden features activation, financial growth, customer satisfaction, etc. These parameters are fed from various sources and require constant refresh and update to provide CSM with an accurate picture of the latest status.
Using manual methods such as Microsoft Excel is not efficient or effective, and it does not scale. Hence, to manage the Customer Health dashboard effectively as well as to trigger the associated Call-To-Action (CTA) plan will require a proper “Customer Success Tool.”
In general, there are two routes to implementing a Customer Success Tool.
“Purpose Built” Customer Success tools, e.g.Totango and Gainsight, provide a good representation of the various Customer Success applications available today. This is probably the easier and faster route since the organization just needs to upload the data and configure the tool. However, organizations need to budget accordingly.
- Re-purpose existing tools – These can be CRM, ERP, Sales automation tools, or in-house tools. There is potential for these existing tools to be re-purposed to the Customer Success environment. However, it will take a much longer time and effort since they are not designed for Customer Success in the first place. This route is probably for the organization that has the time and programming resources to do the necessary customization.
The Customer Success Tool is the core of Customer Success Practice; vendors such as Cisco Systems require their Partners in the Advanced Customer Experience Specialization to have a Customer Success tool. Hence, it is time for organizations to recognize the importance of the tool and start investing in it.
To Recap
The Top 3 building blocks of a Customer Success Practice are:
- Business block – including Charter, Executive Sponsor, and business plan
- Process block – LAER process playbooks and Customer Success Plan/Adoption Plan
- Tools block – Customer Success tool to automate the Health Score & scale the practice
If you want to learn more about 3rd party services, ISSI has a suite of services, including Customer Success enablement workshops for the above 3 blocks; you can refer to the ISSI website https://issi-inc.com/issi-consulting-services-portfolio/. Feel free to contact us via email at sales@issi-inc.com for further information.
Jonathan WM Lee is the Customer Success Practice Lead. He holds the following certifications – Prosci Certified Change Management, Cisco Customer Success Manager, Microsoft Services Adoption Specialist and has extensive experience of over 100 engagements in training, consulting, and auditing of Customer Success programs, processes, and tools. He is the co-author of the Cisco Advanced Customer Experience Specialization Checklist and Juniper Networks Business Model Transformation Blueprint/Playbook. He has previously spoken in the ISSI-TSIA webinar on “Identifying Strengths & Gaps of your CS Practice.” [4]
References
[1] ISSI Blog “You need to assess your Customer Success practice readiness. Here is why & how.”
[2] “Get in the boat – A journey to relevance” by Pat Bodin and Robert Schaffner
ISBN 978-1-946203-20-5
https://www.amazon.com/Get-Boat-Relevance-Pat-Bodin/dp/1946203203
[3] Rowing harder doesn’t help if the boat is headed in the wrong direction. By Kenichi Ohmae
https://philosiblog.com/2013/06/27/rowing-harder-doesnt-help-if-the-boat-is-headed-in-the-wrong-direction/
[4] ISSI-TSIA webinar on “Identifying Strengths & Gaps of your CS Practice.”
https://www.tsia.com/webinars/identifying-the-strengths-and-gaps-of-your-customer-success-practice
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SiliconIndia has Placed ISSI CEO Burjor Mehta in their 100 Most Promising Companies Founded and Managed by Indians in the U.S. 2022
Are you ready to transform your organization?
You need to assess your Customer Success practice readiness. Here is why & how.
By Jonathan Lee – ISSI Customer Success Practice Lead
Customer Success Practice Blog Series #2
The first blog [1] discussed the “need” for cloud service solution partners to adopt Customer Success as a professional practice. So, what is next? Organizations must know the “starting point” to building the Customer Success practice. This blog explores why it is important to assess the current state of the practice and how you can do it.
First, let’s define what a “Customer Success practice” is, an effective practice [2] typically has the following characteristics:
- A defined strategy, executive sponsor, and charter.
- Defines roles for the people Customer Success Manager (CSM) in this case.
- Operational processes, playbooks, templates, and tools
- Go-To-Market plan
- Optimization and growth plans
A common misconception is that hiring the Customer Success Manager means an organization has a Customer Success practice. Many organizations underestimate the complexity involved in setting up a Customer Success practice. This leads to the following common issues:
- The lack of a strategy & plan results in crucial delays in establishing the practice.
- Avoiding the use of industry best practice blueprints extends the learning curve resulting in the need to redo some of the steps.
These common mistakes typically result in missing opportunities and extending the time to market for the practice.
Why run an assessment?
In the recent joint ISSI-TSIA webinar held in June [3], the live webinar poll on the significant challenges of setting up the Customer Success practice shows diverse factors. These are shown in the diagram below:
The diverse responses show the gravity and wide-ranging challenges that organizations face as they attempt to set up the Customer Success Practice. These concerns could be the tip of the iceberg; there is no telling what other challenges lies ahead and what you don’t know.
The best practice approach recommends that the organization complete an assessment to understand its current state of readiness. This typically covers the skillsets, knowledge, experience, operation, tools, and processes required to establish a successful Customer Success Practice. Without knowing the current state, it is difficult to ascertain the starting point, challenges, and phases needed to ensure the Customer Success practice is operational and effective quickly.
What the assessment covers
Relating to the definition of a practice, it will be logical to approach it based on the 3 broad categories of Business, Process, and Tools
Any new practice needs to start with the right business model, supported by a structured process and scale with access to the appropriate tools.
These 3 broad categories breakdown into nine key Customer Success domains. These nine domains are carefully selected as it represents the core building block of a Customer Success Practice. Completing an assessment through a series of discovery sessions facilitated by an experienced consultant identifies the state of an organization’s capabilities against the best practice in the industry. Best practice would include references from various OEM vendors, Customer Success tool providers, TSIA, etc. The result of the assessment is a “Heat Map” (sample shown below) that shows the maturity of each domain on a 5-scale model. 1 being the least mature (Initial stage), 3 being the “Defined” stage and 5 being the most mature (Best in class).
The use of a heatmap allows organizations to accurately identify their strengths and weaknesses. When the assessment is completed by an experienced Customer Success professional, it will include recommendations that follow industry best practices. The output from the assessment is used as follows:
• The assessment result shows strengths, gaps, and maturity levels and provides the “Starting point” of the practice building and an action plan that prioritizes the areas for development.
• Enables an objective and quantified justification for further development, prioritization of activities, and budget allocation.
Following the assessment, a series of design workshops are required to enable the organization to create a Customer Success Minimum Viable Model (MVP). The output from these workshops includes a business plan, a process playbook, and tool recommendations. Customer Success touches many processes and professional disciplines within an organization. Stakeholders from each of the processes and professional areas must be engaged in the assessment and design workshops.
Experience has shown that organizations completing a practice assessment and running a series of enablement workshops gain better alignment of resources/processes and reduce the time to create the Customer Success practice from years to months. Shortening the time to market by implementing the business plan, operationalizing the process playbook, and investing in the toolset ensures that the organization’s customers rapidly benefit from an effective Customer Success Practice. This, in turn, drives higher customer satisfaction, lower churn, and more opportunities.
To recap
Why you need to assess your Customer Success Practice – ISSI’s field experience has shown that organizations that undertake the practice assessment accelerate the creation and progress of the Customer Success Practice.
How do you assess your Customer Success Practice – Having a structured approach with a maturity heatmap provides an easy-to-understand means to identify the strengths, gaps, and next steps.
If you want to learn more about 3rd party services, ISSI has a suite of services, including Customer Success Practice Assessment and Enablement workshops to support organizations in building the Customer Success Practice (https://issi-inc.com/customersuccess/). Feel free to contact us via email at sales@issi-inc.com for further information.
Jonathan WM Lee is the Customer Success Practice Lead. He holds the following certifications – Prosci Certified Change Management, Cisco Customer Success Manager, Microsoft Services Adoption Specialist and has extensive experience of over 100 engagements in training, consulting, and auditing of Customer Success programs, processes, and tools. He is the co-author of the Cisco Advanced Customer Experience Specialization Checklist and Juniper Networks Business Model Transformation Blueprint/Playbook. He has previously spoken in the ISSI-TSIA webinar on “Identifying Strengths & Gaps of your CS Practice.” [3]
References
[1] ISSI Blog “Is now the right time for cloud service solution providers to adopt a Customer Success approach?”
[2] – Five-phase approach to practice development by Microsoft
[3] ISSI-TSIA webinar on “https://www.tsia.com/webinars/identifying-the-strengths-and-gaps-of-your-customer-success-practice” rel=”noopener” target=”_blank”>Identifying Strengths & Gaps of your CS Practice.”
Are you ready to transform your organization?
Is now the right time for cloud service solution providers to adopt a Customer Success approach?
By Jonathan Lee – ISSI Customer Success Practice Lead
Customer Success Practice Blog Series #1
The current state of Customer Success in the Cloud Partner community
From my experience consulting with channel partners, I generally do not see many having a “dedicated” Customer Success team. The TSIA LAER [2] life cycle for customer engagement defines four phases:
Land – the sales marketing activities to identify and “land” new customers.
Adopt – all the activities that go into making the customer is successfully adopting the new solution.
Expand – working with the customer to identify new opportunities to help them achieve their business objectives.
Renew – working with the customer to ensure a seamless contract renewal phase.
The role of Customer Success in the Cloud Partner community
Let’s examine further the role Customer Success could play within the Partners’ recurring revenue Cloud business.
First, there should be a mindset change – “Adoption” does not happen naturally once the workload is migrated into the cloud. JB Wood, in his book “Complexity Avalanche” [3], presented the term “Consumption Gap” – the difference between what enterprise technology companies deliver and what their corporate customers use. This can be due to a lack of time, understanding, usability, etc. Customer Success takes ownership of the “consumption gap” through adoption activities such as training/knowledge transfer, change champion, etc.
Second, many of the cloud solution providers also advocate “business outcomes” in their sales engagement with customers. However, there is no ownership in helping the Customer realize the outcome post-implementation; this is not the job of the project manager, implementation engineers, or post-sales engineers. Customers do not necessarily know how to realize business outcomes themselves and are frustrated with the lack of an owner to guide them. Customer Success provides this ownership by managing the outcome realization through linking adoption activities to the business case/processes.
Third, Cloud being a new platform means that many customers do not migrate their workloads all at once. They will migrate 1-2 workloads to test the Cloud reliability, usability, customer experience, etc. Hence, Customer Success through their intimate knowledge of the Customer environment and usage of the existing workload can play a major role in convincing customers to migrate more workloads onto the Cloud. Besides, it is much easier and cheaper to sell more to existing customers than to new customers. A recent article from Forbes titled “Why Customer Success Is More Critical Than Ever At Cloud-Native Companies” [4] further reinforces this point.
Last but not least, the typical channel partner contracts with their customers have an “End Date.” If the Cloud Service solution providers do not monitor the Customer’s health in terms of consumption level, customer satisfaction, and related factors, there is a significant churn risk.
As you can see, Customer Success does play a major role in supporting the Customer post-migration onto the Cloud.
How Customer Success supports the Partner’s Cloud business
To summarize, Customer Success supports the following “new” functions for cloud channel partners:
- Drives the organization to ensure that customers realize the business outcomes promised by sales.
- Supports customers in “Adopting” their solution through activities such as “knowledge transfer”, use case workshops, persona mapping, change champion, and program management, etc.
- Implements a “Lifecycle” approach in terms of “Land-Adopt-Expand-Renew” and improves the Customer
- Lifetime Value (LTV) by creating business value for the customer.
- Examines “Expand” opportunities for migrating more workloads by studying the current usage, features used, and customer’s business requirements (Data-driven Expand selling).
- Set up a “Customer Success Health Score” to measure the “health” of the customer in terms of Utilization, financial growth (Annual Recurring Revenue, Upsell/Cross-sell), Customer Satisfaction, Support, etc.)
- Incorporating Customer Success into the Quarterly Business Review – discuss the traffic usage, use case implementation, golden features usage, etc., beyond the current SLA focus discussion
In the industry, Cisco Systems has successfully implemented probably the first - Customer Success specialization (they called it Customer Experience Specialization). Research has shown that Partners investing in Customer Success service have gained tangible business benefits in terms of increased renewal rate, incremental sales and increased win odds.
Conclusion
With the hyperscalers now implementing Customer Success into their programs and the quantifiable business benefits derived from successful Customer Success implementation, as evidenced by Cisco Systems. Now is the time for the Partner community to start adopting a Customer Success approach in their business. Without Customer Success, partners not only miss the business benefits of reducing customer churn and identifying & winning more upsell/cross-sell opportunities but also risk non-compliance in their program status. Strategically they open up the risk of losing a competitive edge to those partners with an effective Customer Success capability.
In conclusion, ISSI recommends that partners start to build Customer Success capabilities now. After all, building a new capability and the underlying practice does not happen overnight.
Look out for my next blog post, which will discuss how to build this capability by first understanding the current status through an “assessment.”
Jonathan WM Lee is the Customer Success Practice Lead. He holds the following certifications – Prosci Certified Change Management, Cisco Customer Success Manager, Microsoft Services Adoption Specialist and has extensive experience of over 100 engagements in training, consulting, and auditing of Customer Success programs, processes, and tools. He is the co-author of the Cisco Advanced Customer Experience Specialization Checklist and Juniper Networks Business Model Transformation Blueprint/Playbook. He has previously spoken in the ISSI-TSIA webinar on “Identifying Strengths & Gaps of your CS Practice.” [5]
References
[1] https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2022/03/16/evolving-microsoft-partner-network-programs-for-partner-growth-and-customer-success/
[2] https://www.tsia.com/blog/laer-explained-a-new-customer-engagement-model-for-a-new-business-era
[3] Complexity Avalanche: Overcoming the Threat to Technology Adoption by JB Wood (2009)
[4] https://www.forbes.com/sites/dharmeshthakker/2020/11/18/why-customer-success-is-more-critical-than-ever-at-cloud-native-companies/?sh=1c0292923582
[5] https://www.tsia.com/webinars/identifying-the-strengths-and-gaps-of-your-customer-success-practice
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3 Signs It’s Time Your Company Establish a Cloud Center of Excellence
Stalled growth / difficulty scaling business
In a “post-pandemic” world where employees and employers must find what their new normal looks like, it can feel for many like business has been at a relative standstill, or has become muddled, with no major growth path in sight. It can be difficult to identify the areas of growth that should prioritized to continue scaling the business. Addressing and standardizing your company’s approach to cloud is an excellent place to start because it touches every part of the business and can continue to jumpstart growth in other areas.
By establishing a CCoE, companies can put in place a tangible roadmap on how to leverage cloud tools to scale and meet business goals. Organizations may have already established a cloud advisory board, but this only drives the “why” behind cloud strategy by aligning the executive team on cloud priorities. A CCoE is the “how” that supports the execution and extension of cloud services and capability sets and helps map and pace continuous proficiencies and skills acquisition. A CCoE enables innovation, scale and efficiencies in the design, delivery, and support of cloud services within the business. In this way, a CCoE truly drives business results.
Additionally, having a CCoE can be a requirement to gain or maintain MSP ranking status. Even if this is not yet a priority for your business, or one you anticipate in the near future, a CCoE is like establishing the cloud proficiency backbone on which the business is built. Such a key pillar of the business and IT infrastructure can be more difficult to shore up retroactively, which is why it is better not to wait. It is critical for a next-generation managed service provider to build and maintain a CCoE to enable leveraging of best practices across the organization and across the breadth of its offered services.
If you plan to stay in the MSP business, public cloud certifications are going to be crucial eventually; and a CCoE is a requirement to achieve AWS — which currently holds 34% of the cloud computing market — and Microsoft certified MSP status.
Siloes / lack of cross-team collaboration
Many businesses still rely on IT departments headed by the CIO to manage the company’s cloud services. Sound familiar? This business structure made a lot more sense 20–30 years ago than it does today. In 2022, the cloud touches every part of modern business to varying degrees and is often the driving force behind a company’s services, operational capacity, and research and development prospects.
It is unrealistic to expect a CIO to manage every facet of cloud strategy without visibility into all areas of the business, much less decision-making power across teams. Even so, when things go wrong, it is the CIO who is held responsible. This is just one reason why having a CCoE to back up the CIO — and the company’s overarching cloud strategy — is vital. A CCoE aligns teams and resources at the company-wide level, driving better visibility for oversight, as well as more collaboration and efficiency. The CCoE serves as a standardizing governing force to which all departments can refer back for guidance and best practices in making cloud strategy decisions.
Identifying the root of siloes or lack of cross-team collaboration can be difficult: misaligned cloud strategy is one invisible threat that can impact even the most tight-knit of teams. Many employees outside of IT still view the cloud as it was 10 years ago — and with a CCoE, that’s okay. The CCoE becomes the equalizing force of cloud understanding and approach for all departments within an organization, taking the guesswork out of cloud capability and strategy for everyone —and reducing the burden on the CIO. CCoE reflects a broad cross-section of complementary skills and perspectives.
Difficulty recruiting and retaining cloud talent
If your business is considering accelerating its cloud growth strategy, you’re not alone. In 2022, due largely to the shift to remote functionality the COVID-19 pandemic required of the world, approximately 94% of enterprises now use cloud. In fact, in 2020 alone, 61% of businesses migrated their workloads to the cloud.
That has spurred a huge cloud talent demand — one that enterprises are struggling to fill. Particularly specialized positions such as cloud architects, data engineers, and solution architects are niche and difficult to source. With every business in need of cloud expertise, it has created an employee’s market where enterprises are in fierce competition to land — and retain — cloud talent. One key differentiator that will stand out in such a demanding market is being a business that has established a CCoE.
A CCoE proves a commitment to cloud growth and excellence within a company because it requires buy-in from the executive team and alliance across all departments. A CCoE supports the cloud professionals within an organization. Without one, the demands placed on cloud professionals (and the level of expertise and headcount required to meet said demand) may be beyond what is realistic — a red flag to potential hires and a major contributor to talent turnover. This is another reason to consider implementing a CCoE early on. It is much easier to bring cloud talent into an enterprise with a clear cloud strategy and demonstrable proof of commitment to that strategy than it is to recruit for an undefined or ill-defined position that may come with a lot of hidden operational baggage.
For managed service providers (and just about every other modern venture), cloud prowess increasingly touches every part of the business — from security to planning and strategy to talent management to customer success. If your organization is experiencing any of the common pain points outlined here, it is a sure sign that it’s time to deploy as CCoE. Don’t wait until it is required to get serious about proactive cloud strategy; it may already be holding back your business.
Sign up for the CCoE webinar!
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