Managed Service Providers (MSPs) continue to face a range of challenges, particularly in a rapidly changing business environment, with modernising and digitising technologies at the top of their list.
In order to deal with these challenges, and deliver the kinds of services and products that their customers are showing growing demand for, MSPs are exploring new revenue opportunities to capitalise on, such as selling cloud services alongside their traditional services.
Looking to cloud services as a revenue stream
The cloud managed services market is expected to reach $82.51 billion by 2025, according to a study conducted by Grand View Research Inc. With MSPs looking at ways to differentiate themselves, improve their value proposition and add another revenue stream to their business, selling cloud services to their customers could end up being a highly lucrative opportunity.
For example, telcos are acutely aware of the slowing growth of conventional voice and data services, and that they need to diversify their sources of revenue. Cloud services are seen as potential growth areas, allowing a telco to position itself as a multi-cloud service provider.
This could involve selling their own infrastructure, including setting up virtual servers for their customers and charging them per Virtual Machine, RAM and CPU, or it could involve reselling services, such as Microsoft Azure and Amazon, to their customers.
The challenges in offering cloud services
MSPs that provide cloud-based services will no doubt require a change in go-to-market strategy to transition to this new offering. What’s more, in offering cloud services, MSPs are often using older legacy systems that are unable to meet these new demands, cannot provide accurate usage and billing, and are simply not made to sell cloud services via subscription models.
It can seem like a daunting process, so there might understandably be concern about taking on cloud-based services to offer to their customers and trying to figure out how to even bill them for it.
Managed Service Providers (MSPs) continue to face a range of challenges, particularly in a rapidly changing business environment, with modernising and digitising technologies at the top of their list.
In order to deal with these challenges, and deliver the kinds of services and products that their customers are showing growing demand for, MSPs are exploring new revenue opportunities to capitalise on, such as selling cloud services alongside their traditional services.
Looking to cloud services as a revenue stream
The cloud managed services market is expected to reach $82.51 billion by 2025, according to a study conducted by Grand View Research Inc. With MSPs looking at ways to differentiate themselves, improve their value proposition and add another revenue stream to their business, selling cloud services to their customers could end up being a highly lucrative opportunity.
For example, telcos are acutely aware of the slowing growth of conventional voice and data services, and that they need to diversify their sources of revenue. Cloud services are seen as potential growth areas, allowing a telco to position itself as a multi-cloud service provider.
This could involve selling their own infrastructure, including setting up virtual servers for their customers and charging them per Virtual Machine, RAM and CPU, or it could involve reselling services, such as Microsoft Azure and Amazon, to their customers.
The challenges in offering cloud services
MSPs that provide cloud-based services will no doubt require a change in go-to-market strategy to transition to this new offering. What’s more, in offering cloud services, MSPs are often using older legacy systems that are unable to meet these new demands, cannot provide accurate usage and billing, and are simply not made to sell cloud services via subscription models.
It can seem like a daunting process, so there might understandably be concern about taking on cloud-based services to offer to their customers and trying to figure out how to even bill them for it.
However, billing customers should never be a roadblock to taking on new product or service offerings. Just because you aren’t sure how to bill for these new services or product add-ons, doesn’t mean that it can’t be done and it shouldn’t be a stumbling block for your changing value proposition.
Outsource your customer billing
Cloud-based services have emerged as one of the key advantages of outsourcing for MSPs. The costs saved on eliminating on-premise hardware infrastructure and software licenses, not to mention extensive hours on labour, can be a significant cost saving for clients
Billing out these services, however, can at times be costly and quite confusing when working with multiple cloud-based consumption/usage feeds. Companies like Outworks already have experience in setting up, and integrating, with these types of supplier feeds and can look to set-up either recurring-based product offerings, “pay-as-you-go” models, or even a combination of both depending on your go-to-market strategy.
We can take care of your billing for you. Whether providing in-house cloud-based products or services, or reselling Microsoft/Amazon services, we can configure any pricing tier and structure that you would want to sell these services for, and place them on a single consolidated invoice broken down by site, service type, cost centre, etc., etc.
As you continue to look for more ways to increase revenue by offering cloud-based consumption products, you need a billing system to keep pace in terms of flexibility, efficiency and competitive advantage. We provide a broad range of services specific to the high transactional billing services industry and our flagship product, BillOut, is constantly evolving to ensure that adopters have that leading edge.
Billing doesn’t have to drain your resources or revenue. By outsourcing your billing processes to Outworks, you can put more energy into your business and selling these new cloud-based products and services. We’ll take care of all, or part of, your billing – and reduce your operating costs and risk in the process.
With billing covered, it means one less headache for you and one less hurdle that could prevent you from moving your business towards a cloud service model offering. Get in touch with us today to get the conversation started.