Radenta Technologies, one of the leading Microsoft solutions providers in the country, recently joined Crayon Connect 2023, an annual event that gathers channel partners across the Philippines.
The main highlight of the event is the presentation of a custom study done by Forrester, a leading global research company. The study titled, “The Future of Operations: Maximize Value from the Cloud with a Strategic Mindset,” showed the concerns and aspiration of small and medium-sized enterprises with regard to cloud adoption and how solutions providers can best address the situation.
Respondents came from Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia, and South Korea.
Key findings indicate that SMEs continue to look to cloud adoption to drive growth, benefits, and customer value. Limited internal resources hinder companies from adopting cloud technology.
The lack of budget and technical knowledge has increased engagement with third-party service providers. SMEs increasingly view service providers as partners who share the same values in achieving cloud goals, aiding in advanced cloud usage, and providing end-to-end support.
The study further showed that business and IT objectives mirror each other. Improving the experience of customers is at 86 percent while improving IT capabilities to enhance customer experience is at 85 percent.
Growing revenue is at 83 percent while aligning IT performance to business metrics is at 80 percent. Improving the skills and capabilities of employees is at 81 percent while improving IT reliability and resilience is at 78 percent.
Eighty-three percent of respondents say SMEs will either maintain or increase their cloud investments in the next 2 years with the following spread across operational domains: 66 percent, security; 53 percent, business continuity; 38 percent, business applications, 34 percent, infrastructure; and 23 percent, workforce productivity.
The benefits per operational domain showed 57 percent reduced/avoided cyberattacks, 51 percent improved ability to meet compliance regulations, 47 percent lowered overall costs, 41 percent lowered total cost of ownership, and 58 percent improved collaboration with external parties.
SMEs, however, remain behind larger enterprises regarding cloud adoption. Forrester’s Cloud Maturity Assessment showed that SMEs score a cloud maturity of 3.61 out of 5, indicating the lack of plans to support people, process, and technology.
Across operational domains, less than half of SMEs engage third party service providers. This results in struggles in managing software licensing issues, having security concerns, and facing performance concerns. Nonetheless, most respondents, or 88 percent, indicated that they see an increase in third party service providers spend.
The number one reason respondents engage with third party service providers is the lack of budget to do the work in-house at 60 percent saying that skilled IT personnel are expensive to hire.
Providers having better knowledge of technology come second at 52 percent. Third, 42 percent want to take advantage of a provider’s pre-built software and project accelerators.
The same percentage comes in at fourth with the acknowledgement of not having the skills and methods in house. Finally, 39 percent admitted to having trouble keeping up with emerging technologies.
SMEs now look at third party service providers as value-aligned partners and not mere suppliers.
In the next 24 months, enterprises will go into engagement for the following reasons: business applications to manage cloud operations services, 76 percent; security for cloud strategy development, 66 percent; workforce productivity for integration services, 65 percent; business continuity for cloud strategy development, 64 percent; and infrastructure for migration and re-platform, 58 percent.
Michelle Lasam, Radenta Technologies Microsoft line of business operations manager, was one of the panelists and this is what she said on how the company learns from wins and losses.
“We walk the talk. We do not just sell the technologies; we use them internally. We use technology to track down opportunities, analyze market trends, identify where we need to improve, see where our strengths lie and pinpoint where we are at in terms of achieving our goals,” Lasam said.
As to why increasingly small and medium sized businesses are seeking strategic engagement with their partners, Lasam breaks it down with her answer.
“It is beneficial for an enterprise to partner with vendors like Radenta because we do the grunt work for them so they can focus more on running their business. We have the experience, infrastructure, and the processes for a seamless and cost-efficient transition,” Lasam said.
Find out more about cloud adoption, call Radenta at (02) 8535-7801, 0908-812-4891, email info@radenta.com or log on to http://www.radenta.com.
