The Benefits and Benevolence of a Cloud Marketplace

Posted on 13th September 2016 Under Cloud, GMS, NEC

Earlier in the year, the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona saw NEC launch their Cloud Partner Portal and Cloud Store, with the desire to make cloud solutions easier to procure for their customers and to help give their partners greater reach. NEC hopes to better manage its partners with the portal, saying this will enable companies to become a more proactive and valuable partners, and promote cloud services and products to a wider audience. Helping more and more organisations – both large and small – benefit from the cloud is the aim.

There is clearly a growing demand for cloud applications marketplaces, driven by an ecosystem of third party developers and an ISV partner community around a company’s core technology. NEC have joined a number of large and medium size companies including Amazon, AppDirect, and VMware in leading this digital transformation through providing such a cloud services marketplace for their customers. The Harvard Business Review defined this transition as going from a pipeline to a platform business model. According to Oxford Research, 78% of enterprises believe that a driven, on-demand consumption model enabled via a Marketplace will be a critical factor for gaining competitive advantage in the next three years.

And from the consumer perspective, the number of products and services on offer, they get bountiful choice from a single source. Everyone benefits, especially as appetite for cloud services continues to grow and grow.  Analysts agree that cloud’s momentum will continue to build in all areas, from software, hardware, and IT outsourcing to the nurturing of innovations. Forrester Research projects the public cloud market will reach $191 billion by 2020. Cloud applications lead the pack with an expected $133 billion in 2020 and Forrester anticipates cloud platforms will generate $44 billion in revenue by 2020, while cloud business services will bring in $14 billion.

“Cloud is a hot trend … and it’s a real trend,” says Daryl Plummer, Chief of Research for Cloud Computing at Gartner Inc., VP, and Gartner Fellow. “It’s going to keep getting bigger, and for that reason, companies want to take advantage of it and are beginning to understand how to take advantage of it—and that’s when they need help finding the right service.”

This is especially true when the pool of options is as vast and deep as the global cloud market.

With today’s executives opting to consume technology through self-service delivery methods, technology companies are presented with the opportunity to establish cloud marketplaces that elevate some of the pressure of navigating through providers and services. NEC is a trusted brand, and that trust can be leveraged by their partners to cater to the growing demand for cloud services and solutions.

“We see great opportunity and benefits for our current channel partners, integrators and service providers, to expand their offering with cloud applications on top of their current services portfolio,” said Paul Kievit, president and head of NEC Enterprise Solutions in EMEA.

Having partnered with NEC in 2012, GMS stand to benefit significantly from this marketplace. “We have already gained significant traction in emerging markets, such as Indonesia and Algeria”, says Jonathan Joseph, head of new business development at GMS, “That’s something we would not have achieved without the NEC marketplace”.

GMS also hopes that a similar partnership with AppDirect will reap further benefits. “Its definitely something we see as being very important to the future of this organisation,” Jonathan Joseph confirms. Marketplaces have potential to hold a lot of value. Organizations that plan to take advantage of the cloud will not stop at just one service, but will likely need hundreds of services over the coming years as more parts of the enterprise realise the benefits of the cloud. For GMS, this means the foot is already in the door.