STORAGE AS A SERVICE: A WIN-WIN FOR THE CHANNEL AND MODERN BUSINESSES

The channel is looking for ways to continue delivering the innovation that companies desperately need, with never before seen levels of flexibility and customisation, all without large upfront costs. Geoff Greenlaw, VP of Channel for EMEA & LATAM at Pure Storage explains why STaaS is a win-win for the channel as well as the modern business.

In the wake of the pandemic, it was crucial for IT departments to ramp up their technological capabilities to support increased digitalisation efforts. Overnight, businesses were dealing with challenges such as implementing contactless payments, teleconferencing, telemedicine, and e-commerce. Unfortunately, this acceleration meant some businesses did not factor in tech debt, which refers to the off-balance-sheet accumulation of all the tech work companies are required to do in the future. As a result, today’s digital transformation investments are being threatened by this tech debt. To compound this challenge, pressing ahead with digital transformation initiatives on top of a foundation of legacy IT architecture risks creating an expensive and difficult-to-maintain infrastructure, which is also impacting organisational performance and increasing cyber risk. It has become a vicious cycle.

The channel is constantly evolving in step with the changing business landscape, and never more so than in the last couple of years. IT budgets have been cut across the board against a challenging macroeconomic environment, coupled with war and energy crises. The result is companies being stuck with underperforming, complex and energy inefficient legacy solutions. This has also meant there is less opportunity for the channel to help organisations with their digital transformation, as technology

CapEx spends have been reigned in, impacting the channel’s bottom line. Today, the channel is looking for ways to continue delivering the innovation that companies desperately need, with never before seen levels of flexibility and customisation, all without large upfront costs.

Enter Storage as a-Service (STaaS)

STaaS is a service focused consumption model for storage procurement that allows organisations to provision the capacity and performance they need on-premises, in the cloud, or any other combination, and pay for it on an as-aservice basis. STaaS is a great option for enterprises that need infrastructure to accommodate different workloads for short and longer-term projects without operational or cost penalties, so long as effective SLAs are put into place. It removes much of the complexity and risk associated with data storage and reduces friction, costs and complications associated with sharing data across the enterprise. Crucially, STaaS doesn’t require the same substantial CapEx outlay of traditional IT infrastructure.

A win-win for the channel and today’s businesses

The storage as-a-service market was valued at $17.30Bn in 2020 and, according to research firm ATR, is expected to grow 16.1% by 2027 to $49.54Bn. For partners, this development offers a promising outlook. STaaS provides a means for the partner community to offer modern, energy efficient solutions to meet customer aspirations and challenges. They can serve a wider range of customers, both those who buy hardware through a CapEx model, those looking for more flexibility through as-a-service and also a middle option where customers want to own the hardware but not manage the solution. At the end of the day, it’s all about being able to provide customers with choice and meet their needs. Without the ability to offer this, partners might see themselves sidelined in favour of hyperscalers which offer convenient, though often not ideal solutions, to channel partners’ customer bases.

The reason why STaaS is resonating so well is because organisations can do more with less, when STaaS is delivered as a true service offering, allowing customers to streamline processes and operations traditionally managed internally back to the STaaS provider. This benefit is over and above the ability to align spend with actual consumption and the significant economic benefit that delivers. Furthermore, STaaS can deliver the same cloud-like experience without necessarily requiring a commitment to public cloud. This has created new opportunities for customers to realise the outcomes that are typically associated with the public cloud without the associated adoption challenges.

Hurdles for partners to avoid with STaaS

Not all STaaS offerings are created equal and partners need to look to offer a true value-added service, as some vendors simply offer OpEx billing disguised as a service. This would be more like a lease, where products are deployed on a multi-year cycle and upgraded at the end as part of forklift upgrades. For channel partners to succeed they should offer solutions with guaranteed service levels and automated upgrades to meet performance and capacity guarantees at no additional cost. Partners should also check if the STaaS provider is able to provide file and block access storage as well as fast file and object storage on the same hardware. Only then will all workloads be covered — from fast transactional block access to unstructured file data to fast throughput for analytics and recovery. Monitoring software is another plus as it gives customers an overview of the capacity utilisation and performance of the storage infrastructure on-premises and in the cloud.

Some partners that do not have a wealth of experience selling as-aservice solutions may see challenges in shifting from a CapEx orientation to selling service subscriptions. Such challenges might include a lengthier revenue collection timeframe, adapting quoting/invoicing systems/processes to subscription-oriented transactions, and adjusting the compensation models of

Geoff Greenlaw, Pure Storage

their internal sales teams. Partners also face the challenge of ensuring internal sales teams are trained to sell as-aservice/subscription/consumptionoriented solutions, a skillset that can be different from selling hardware/ software/maintenance packages. Partners that want to participate in the growing as-a-service market should establish a formal transformation programme to analyse and adopt the changes needed to internal skills, processes and technology.

STaaS driving the channel’s bottom line

With those challenges come new opportunities, however. As-a-service sales present a unique moment for partners to add value to offerings by bundling in additional services, reducing investment needed by the customer in the areas of IT admin and maintenance. Even partners that do not have aspirations to ‘layer in’ a higher-level service wrapper will find that STaaS sales will drive more frequent contact with the customer and greater insight into customer challenges and opportunities to address them. The as-a-service model generates much higher frequency contact with the customer than would a traditional CapEx transaction.

The best technology vendors out there are offering everything from training and enablement activities for pre-sales and service delivery teams on how to position and then deliver STaaS, to consultation on how partner organisations can smoothly transform themselves from traditional productoriented organisations to serviceoriented. This partnership will make a real difference to the channel’s bottom line this year and beyond.