I recently wrote two articles for the APM Digest on how to differentiate your cloud offerings in the service provider market. It started from a survey question that we asked at the annual HostingCon event in Boston: “Who do you see as you biggest competitor in the Cloud market?”
The answers we got were a little surprising to us. Considering Amazon Web Services (AWS) was generating a large amount of attention, it turns out that at the top of the list for service provider competitors is Rackspace (32%), followed by Softlayer (20%).
Taking this further, we asked how service providers differentiate themselves from the competition. 59% said “management and support,” and another 32% said “customer control and tools.” Only 22% of respondents said “applications” were a significant differentiator for them in the hosting space.
Not that the applications aren’t important, but it’s clear that the need in the market is in management of increasingly complex infrastructure environments.
So, how do you differentiate cloud services? The key is offering full visibility into the cloud infrastructure and advanced monitoring. Infrastructure reliability and availability alone are no longer enough. And for those providers offering new app layer services, including advanced monitoring, marginal revenue is on the increase. At ScienceLogic, we completely agree with the notion that management and support of both customers and their IT infrastructure is critical.
You can read more about my thoughts on competitive differentiators in the service provider market, with my two articles at APM Digest here and here.