Bull UK's innovative Cloud go-to-market strategy targeted at mid-sized businesses
The strategy, based on the concept of ‘journey management’, involves Bull guiding its mid-sized customers on a ‘step-by-step’ journey to cloud computing at a pace with which each customer is comfortable, with clearly defined outcomes at each stage of the process. Dependent upon the cultural readiness and maturity of any given customer, the journey will help transition IT from a cost to a driver of added value for the business.“Marketers have in the past positioned cloud computing as a revolution,” says Andrew Carr, sales and marketing director, Bull UK and Ireland. “Bull sees the ongoing business migration to the cloud as more of an evolutionary journey that will ultimately provide a greater range of choice for users.
“The objective for businesses is to modernise the way their customers and internal users consume IT services,” adds Carr. “They want services to be available whenever they require from any device and they want those services to meet their precise needs. To achieve these goals, they need a partner to guide them – and that is where Bull fits in.
“We have focused on mid-sized businesses because we see them as a key market that has previously been neglected by providers,” he continues. “We believe these customers now need to obtain value from technology rather than simply using it.”
In the first stage of the new approach, ‘Consolidate’, Bull will focus on helping customers, standardise and streamline their infrastructure, reduce their facilities and management costs and increase the security and availability of their systems. In the second, ‘Virtualise’, which involves the delivery of virtualisation solutions and services, Bull will concentrate on helping customers improve efficiency by increasing workload, reducing hardware, floor space, management and energy costs, and enhancing flexibility.
The third phase, ‘Commoditise’, sees Bull focus on delivering managed services to its customers, which in turn helps them to convert capital expense (CAPEX) into operating expense (OPEX). In the final phase, ‘Cloudify’, Bull delivers secure cloud services helping customers achieve power on demand and boost their flexibility with blended services.
“We are moving to a world dominated by an ‘Internet of Things’, where even everyday objects are becoming web-enabled,” says Carr. “In line with this, citizens and customers alike have high expectations based on their personal use of IT and the Internet today. They expect the same level and quality of service inside the office as they get outside it – and we need to provide this.
“With our new market proposition, we are looking to give customers enhanced business agility together with the flexibility to scale rapidly,” he continues. “We are also looking to provide a rich customer experience and allow our customers to deploy services based on a consumption forecast, with predictable, transparent and known costs. We want them to be able to maximise their return on a depreciating investment.”
From the IT perspective, the new market strategy will deliver a range of benefits: everything from virtualisation and rationalisation of IT services to reduced server sprawl and from easier back-up and archiving to reduced time to meet business needs.
Hemel Hempstead, UK 9 June, 2011:
