We at Pilvi visited HostingCon Europe in Amsterdam as part of the first leg of our European roadshow. During the convention we were able to sit in on one particularly interesting panel discussion presented by:

 

  • Tony Lucas, Flexiant
  • Jelle Franck van der Zwet, Interxion
  • Phil Worms, iomart Group
  • Marco van den Akker, ComputeNext
  • Chris Latterell, Open-Xchange

In which the panel discussed The State of the European Cloud Market .

Here we’d like to go through some of the key points brought up during the discussion:

The first point brought up during the panel is that customers’ need and want for local support will not change even when moving to the cloud, companies have expressed a strong desire to maintain their local partners to be able to guide them in the cloud. This provides strong evidence that the need for local hosting providers as experts will not be fading or going anywhere. It is up to you as a local provider to be able to adapt to this paradigm shift.

At the same time in the wake of this shift it may be relevant to think about whether all local hosting companies have a need for their own data centers any more? Physical data centers are large scale long-term investments which may become less and less desirable for a vast majority of customers.

The thought is further supported by questions posed to representatives of start-ups, who will be the hosting companies customers of the future, who answered that their concern and interest does not lie in having their information stored in hardware and physical locations. Rather, services provided, on-demand, and the scalability of services being two key factors.

In our blog posts we have previously touched on key points in the industry such as, customers growing needs and demands and their desire to work with 1-3 trusted providers for all their hosting needs. We keep on coming across these two points in all of our research and, during panel discussions we have read and attended, we believe that both require attention, and as such open new opportunities for your hosting business.

Customers are less interested in tech specs, and much more focused on a running fully functional service, growing needs and demands, include not only quick access to information, but also the scalability of services. Opportunities in cloud hosting can open the door to quick and easy scalability of services, capacity increases can be offered in a matter of a click, changes can be made near instantaneously. By optimizing your hosting offering using the global cloud, you can provide customers with a largely increased portfolio of products to fit any need they may have.

In breaking down some of the fruits of the panel discussion and looking at how Pilvi can help you capitalize on most of what was brought up, we can determine some of the following.

Pilvi can help smaller scale hosting companies by equipping them with the tools of a large partner (eg. Amazon), thus being able to offer the same large company benefits to their customers. Hence, this answers demand for increasing demands on one front.

Now looking at working with 1-3 trusted partners for demands, again Pilvi can open doors to brokering cloud services from multiple providers, and hence your customers have access to a vast array of services from different service providers all through the same place.

What can be crucial to this last point of working with 1-3 trusted providers is something else that was brought up during discussions. In the coming years cloud providers will be specializing themselves, all providers will not be looking to get into every sector, but with their detailing and specializing this will increase the need for a customer to look to multiple providers to answer all their needs. Meaning a company would have to work with more and more providers, this being something undesirable, through Pilvi, even with the increased specialization your hosting company can still provide all of these different services through the one channel. Hence, you can remain your customers’ 1 trusted provider.

An ever changing environment in a vastly growing new field provides new challenges, which brings about new opportunities. We want to work together to get the most out of the new opportunities for you, contact us, let’s connect and talk about how we can go about doing this for you. Get out in front of the competition with Pilvi: contact us.

 

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