Canalys beancounters have warned that the big cloud players need to sort out their trust issues with the channel.
The big cloud providers need the channel to help widen sales but need to be straighter with the channel and build trust if they are going to deepen the relationship throughout what is set to be a year of growth, Canalys said.
AWS continued to hold its position as the dominant cloud service provider in Q4, but Azure is taking more share as it looks to mount a challenge to its rival.
Numbers from Canalys indicated that worldwide cloud infrastructure spends increased by 46 per cent in the fourth quarter coming in at more than $80 billion for the year.
Cloud infrastructure is one of the most critical sectors in the IT industry because of its numerical value and size.
AWS held onto the top spot in the fourth quarter with its share of customer spend at 32 percent. Microsoft Azure increased its share by two percentage points to 16 percent and Google Cloud reached nine percent. In fourth Alibaba Cloud maintained a four percent share.
Canalys principal analyst Matthew Ball said: “Cloud infrastructure services provide the core components needed to support businesses’ digital transformation initiatives around building new customer experiences, deploying IoT to transform processes, using big data and analytics for better insights, and embedding machine learning and AI for automation.
“Market dynamics have changed over the last 12 months, with more businesses opting for multi-cloud and hybrid-IT environments to use the strengths of different cloud service providers and deployment models dependent on application and data requirements, compliance, cost and performance.”
Those changing dynamics have had an impact on channel partners with many being called on to make life simpler for those customers dealing with multi-cloud environments.
Cloud service providers needed to “build trust with channel partners” and avoid rolling out initiatives to changing Ts & Cs to drive direct sales.
“Microsoft is the current dominant force in the channel for cloud services, through the continued expansion of its Cloud Solution Provider program. But as it offers more direct purchasing options to Azure customers through its new Microsoft Customer Agreement, its partner strategy faces increased scrutiny. This creates an opportunity for rivals to exploit growing uncertainty among Microsoft’s partners.”
