Cloud Services Surge: Helping our Client hone in on large migration deals

Enabling our client to gain traction in its cloud migration and orchestration deals through productizing service elements.

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Our Client’s Problem
Our client – the cloud services division of a prominent software vendor – was wanting to refine its services framework, but was not sure which elements of this framework should be productized. Our client had lost multiple 7-figure deals with its enterprise customers because its focus was on custom services over productized services.

Our Brief
Our client wanted us to look at two top-tier cloud services vendors that were world leaders in mission-critical areas like cloud migration, cloud-native application development, and cloud managed services. Our objective was to gain an in-depth understanding of the capabilities and service offerings of these vendors, with specific focus on their capabilities in handling complex cloud-based operations.

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In addition to assessing their core competencies around cloud services, our client was particularly interested in understanding the nature and extent of these vendors' collaborations with leading cloud infrastructure providers. We were also asked to explore whether these vendors have established partnerships with major cloud platforms such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud as these partnerships are often indicative of the vendor's ability to integrate with and leverage these platforms' advanced features.

Our Method
Given the specialized nature of this task, our client recognized the limitations of their internal resources to do this type of work. At 4D, we pride ourselves in the Depth of our research – it is one of our founding values. To support our client's needs, we engaged two seasoned Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) who recently worked at the cloud services companies we were looking at. These SMEs, with decades-long experience in implementing cloud-based projects for enterprises, were on-boarded and interviewed to provide the detailed insights and expertise required for this project.
 

Client Outcomes
Based on our due diligence, we learnt that for cloud migration services, one of the prominent vendors follows a defined framework for its services contracts. Once a client engagement starts:

1) Consulting Services: The vendor’s Consulting Practice Leaders come in initially to review the customer cloud strategy (if they have one) or build one for the next 5-10 years, modernize roadmaps, and create disaster recovery plans.
 

2) Infrastructure Services: Post Consulting, the vendor’s Infrastructure arm comes in to discuss and ramp-up storage, servers, security, data centers and SDN/NFV infra.
 

3) Cloud Ecosystem: Running in parallel with Infrastructure Services, the vendor provides systems integration, and actual workload migration management, and program governance services.
 

4) Lifecycle Management: Once the migration is done, the vendor will have a full team that can do managed services, including Service Assurance, KPI monitoring and Implementation, SLA conformance, cloud orchestration and automation (they have a very strong tool set of this), and performance management.

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Our due diligence showed that core elements of each of the above four pillars were productized by one of the leading vendors, giving them traction and allowing them to win major deals among enterprise customers. We were able to identify which elements our client also needed to productize.

As a result, our client took our advice and began a program of restructuring their service portfolio, resulting in over 75% of their services now being offered as out-of-the-box products. This resulted in an immediate 10%+ uplift in deal flow for our client within 6 months of their restructuring program.

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