Want to sell cloud? Here’s what you need to think about

By Tom O’Keefe, consultant

Cloud has been a topic of conversation for years now in federal circles without a great deal of meaningful movement. Government is still heavily reliant on legacy infrastructure stacks and is making slow but steady progress to shuttering those systems and moving the applications that rested on them into different types of cloud environments.

But the cloud market is largely defined by a few major players – the behemoth that is AWS, Microsoft Azure and subscription models for popular pieces of software like Microsoft Office, Adobe and Salesforce.

This can leave a reseller or technology OEM at somewhat of a loss as to how to proceed, so here are a few tips and tricks when thinking about cloud:

• DON’T build your own XaaS deployment from scratch for the federal marketplace – FedRAMP certifications, which give companies authorization to sell cloud security to government agencies, are projected to be down this year and still take an extensive amount of time before you can ramp-to-revenue.
• DO partner with a distributor that can provide a FedRAMP-certified platform at scale for you to host your solution on.
• DON’T try and cover every aspect of technology in the cloud, stretching yourself too thin to be able to compete with more nimble VARs.
• DO develop specialized practices in particular aspects of technology that are valuable to helping federal agencies migrate to the cloud and keep their operations running smoothly.

Cloud is by no means a closed-market, but it’s important to understand that trying to compete with someone on the level of AWS isn’t the best path to take. Developing in-depth experience with certain types of solutions or projects in the cloud is likely a key to success in the future.

Learn more about government IT trends at the 4^th Annual Government IT Sales Summit on Nov. 16, 2017, in Reston, VA. And plan to catch the “Advancing Cloud Opportunities for Agency Transformation” session to hear more on cloud.