When we think of the short to mid-term with regards to the provision and delivery of cloud services, it is clear we are in an era of transformative digital change — one driven by pre-pandemic forces as well as the COVID pandemic itself. That said, we at Arrow also believe there are four large, global macro themes that are impacting the delivery of cloud services today. These will undoubtedly accelerate distribution’s role and importance in the cloud service delivery ecosystem. In our opinion, these macro themes are:
- Complexity of delivery — The cloud services landscape is becoming more complex, intermingling technologies often deployed across platforms
- Exploding potential and adoption in the SMB market
- Talent shortages — Finding and hiring the correct talent
- Education challenges — Ensuring that cloud talent continues to keep abreast of technology developments and new services and features
At Arrow, our strategy for mitigating and exploiting these trends revolves around the “4 Ps” approach: platform, portfolio, proficiency and practices.
Platform
ArrowSphere, our cloud delivery and management platform, brings first-class functionalities and capabilities to our customer ecosystem — whether that be channel partners or vendors. For our vendor customers, this is the place to grow and scale their cloud solutions, a place to get exposed to over 5,000 active EMEA cloud service providers delivering best-of-breed cloud services to their end customers. For channel partners, this is a one-stop shop where they can search/discover/provision, manage, analyse, and bill the cloud services their clients demand, as well as add their own offerings to the catalogue via specific functionalities and open APIs. Our agile development approach is fostered through our entire R&D being based in Paris close to our growing EMEA channel partner community.
Portfolio of products and services
The market-leading catalogue of products available on ArrowSphere offers an extensive list of IaaS, PaaS and SaaS solutions as well as cloud software solutions tailored for managed service providers. These various delivery models can be deployed via the same single pane of glass. In addition to this, our platform also features a growing list of managed services designed to bolster the capability and reach of our downstream ecosystem.
Proficiency
For a number of years, we have been investing in local and European cloud-dedicated programme specialists as well as technical and sales resources to be as close as possible to our channel partners and as a result, their end-customer needs. Our teams are highly certified, holding hundreds of certifications across multiple cloud services and act as an extension of our channel partners’ resources. The right number of resources combined with the right skills is fundamental to bringing vendors and channel partners the support they need so they can focus on outcome driven plans. Arrow’s scale and reach allows us to become the trusted advisor of choice with regards to cloud services for our downstream ecosystem.
Practices
Our cloud service delivery best practices are in constant evolution and our channel partners benefit from this learning through our scale and breadth. This is about learning, experiencing, showcasing, replicating and scaling via established functions such as our cloud center of excellence. This improves our effectiveness and supplements the value we bring to our vendors and channel partners. This holistic, unified approach allows us to serve both our local customers as well as our customers throughout other parts of Europe without duplicating efforts. Again, this approach allows our channel partners to benefit from scaling multipliers.
