According to Dan Lane, CTO of telecoms provider, TelcoSwitch, the comms channel has the opportunity to capitalise on the Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD), which exists amongst organisations with pressures to prioritise investment in digital transformation, without a reliable cloud strategy to support it.
A recent study commissioned by Deloitte and Informatica revealed that businesses are increasingly fearing that cloud failure will lead to a derailment of their digital transformation strategy. Only 43 per cent of the sample size taken from IT and business leaders, declared their confidence in the ability of their cloud strategy to support their digital transformation and data management initiatives over the next 12-24 months.
Dan suggests that the FUD, which exists around the market, presents the comms channel with a unique opportunity to deliver Unified Communications (UC) solutions to support digital transformation strategies and help deliver confidence back to the market.
He said, "digital transformation is very much the buzz word of 2016, with a lot of noise being generated around the importance of having a strategy in place, but the reality of actually implementing one is proving a lot more challenging. Increasingly, we are seeing businesses coming under pressure to deliver what customers need, leading to questions being asked about the robustness of their cloud strategies. The truth is an effective cloud strategy should not hinder your business; it should enhance it.
Recently, Microsoft's global SMB boss revealed that more than half of revenue in its SMB business comes from cloud technology. Further evidence to support this also comes from the Cloud Industry Forum (CIF); just under half (49 per cent) of those end user organisations questioned are already using a hosted VOIP service, with a further 17 per cent actively planning for it in the near future. Broadly looking at cloud adoption of those organisations, 77 per cent use at least two services and one in eight (12 per cent) have deployed five or more.
Dan concluded, "It's clear from these findings that engagement in cloud services is deepening and with this a critical business opportunity is presenting itself for the comms channel industry. Having confidence in your cloud strategy is critical to this process, failure to do so, will only see your business surpassed by more competent competitors, who have a clearly defined digital transformation strategy and are willing to harness the power of cloud technology to deliver mission critical services, such as hosted telephony solutions. Smart comms channel players will see this and look to act now."