By Melissa Zelyez, Cisco Marketing Manager

Why are 50% of all businesses open to changing cloud providers? Service providers can be the top choice, if they prepare now...

Today most businesses currently using cloud services do so through cloud providers, value-added resellers (VAR), system integrators, and other vendors; not through direct relationships with service providers.

Enterprises need to decide how they will manage their networking needs and their cloud environments. Service providers can be the top choice -if they deliver a great end-user experience.

According to a recent survey by AMI-Partners,* said they would switch to a service provider to get these 5 infrastructure benefits:

1. Simple and easy service ordering and self-provisioning
2. Automated service and network provisioning, account management and configuration
3. Ongoing service capacity - scale up or down as needed
4. Consumption/usage Based Billing (flexibility to be billed for what you use)
5. Turn service on/off on demand

What are these IT and networking services?

ITaaS (IT as a Service) is a technology-delivery method that treats IT (information technology) as a commodity, providing an enterprise with exactly the amount of hardware, software, and support that it needs for an agreed-on monthly fee. In this context, IT encompasses all of the technologies for creating, storing, exchanging, and using business data.* Typically these types of services would include things like web hosting, storage, security, hosted email, hosted LAN/WANs, collaboration, video, voice over IP, among many others.

According to research from AMI-Partners, many (47%) said they were likely to expand these services in their businesses.

Source: AMI-Partners study, March 2015.

Strong market growth for service providers

So, businesses are not only expanding these services, they are totally open to switching to a service provider. According to the AMI-Partners Study 30-50% of businesses indicated they would switch to service providers that offered the benefits listed above.

In fact, ITaaS delivered from the cloud with a software-defined infrastructure will add up to$47 billion to the global market by 2019, according to the AMI-Partners study.$15 billion in market expansion is expected in 2016 alone as service providers introduce a variety of services based on ITaaS. This uplift is driven by service providers selling both directly (Telco/Cable) and indirectly (other channels).

Channel Partners can help you deliver a great end-user experience

To tap into this opportunity and enjoy the added revenue, it's crucial that service providers forge new and closer relationships with channel partners. As for the solution itself, Cisco has the cloud infrastructure, Software defined networking (SDN) and Networking Functions Virtualization (NFV) solutions service providers need to offer a remarkable ITaaS network experience.

With ITaaS delivered by service providers in the cloud to the new wave of business customers, a great user experience becomes the magic behind your brand, whether you build it yourself or resell our ITaaS offers. It also strengthens the brands of your channel partners, business customers, and even their customers too.

*According to Tech Target's Whatis page: http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/IT-as-a-Service-ITaaS

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