Resellers and service providers should apply honesty in helping small and medium enterprises (SMEs) get full business value in their transition to the cloud.
So says Bernard Kur, head of product development for Global Micro Solutions, who believes that this will lead to SMEs eventually also growing to levels achieved by big corporates.
According to Kur, service providers and resellers are more concerned about making the sale, but no one is actually being the trusted advisor where SMEs are engaged about adopting cloud services that align to their business needs.
"Before executing a sales pitch, service providers should take into consideration the numerous challenges SMEs face. Lack of personnel, for one, where the person doing administration work could also be the marketer or accountant in the SME environment," says Kur. "When the SME goes down or loses data, the repercussions amount to potentially closing the business."
One of the key differentiators, explains Kur, is offering SMEs a financially-backed service level agreement.
"If the SME decides to put something in the cloud, they need to be confident that there'll be financial recourse if the service provider does things incorrectly. There should be certain governing policies in place should incidents such as data security bridges arise, for example."
Kur further notes that SMEs should be informed about how the service providers' network is laid out, encouraging them ask if services providers offer a dual or single data centre.
"This means that if that single data centre goes down, the SME should know there are other options available to them for connectivity."
He emphasises that the location of these data centres is also critical for immediate access of the service provider in case of emergencies.
"What happens if the SME decides to do an upgrade? This is where SMEs need to know about continuity, flexibility and any possible modifications that can be included in the cloud service they acquire."
He advises SMEs to research how long a particular service provider has been offering cloud services and gauge their track record.
A lot of local companies, according to Kur, have not adopted SharePoint, which is one of Microsoft's biggest selling products overseas. He says that this illustrates his point that resellers are not taking the time to educate companies about the implementation phase.
"Service providers should make available products that enable SMEs to compete with large corporates, are adaptable to the SMEs requirements, and it needs to be a process where the SME can select a set of cloud services tailored to their strategic business decisions."
"The value of the sale should ultimately be measured by how much effort service providers bring in and not how much money they make out of it," concludes Kur.
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