Meeting the Challenge of Reselling Cloud Services

Today’s Guest Blog comes to us courtesy of Steve Vicinanza, CEO of Cirrity.

As a reseller, your customers depend on you to fully qualify and carefully select the products and services you recommend. This is especially true when you resell cloud computing services, which establish a dependency between the customer and the cloud provider. If the cloud provider fails to live up to the customer’s expectations, your relationship with the customer can be irreparably damaged. It is critical to partner with the right cloud provider, one which understands the reseller’s commitments, business drivers, and responsibilities.

As a 100% channel-focused cloud provider, Cirrity understands the value of your relationship with your customers and takes our partnership seriously. 100% of our sales are through our resellers, so success is mutual; our success depends on your success and vica versa. This means you can invest in your customers with confidence that we will never circumvent your relationship or sell directly.

In addition, we help our resellers develop new relationships with qualified leads that are not just over the fence, so to speak. We have a substantial qualification process in place to make sure every lead we pass on to you is worth your time.

Because Cirrity works with resellers across the U.S., we know what works and what doesn’t when selling cloud. To help you be successful as a reseller, we bring a comprehensive sales enablement plan to the table:

Assess: To begin with, we will work with you to assess your strengths and weaknesses when it comes to selling cloud services. We offer a preliminary assessment you can complete online. Then we perform a more comprehensive assessment with you to help you understand where you need to focus and how you can introduce cloud services into your portfolio.

Recommend: After your assessment, we’ll offer recommendations for how you can be successful in the cloud. For example, we can work with you to create a compelling cloud compensation plan to drive sales. We can also help you develop a “cloud champion” within your company to make sure your cloud strategy is adopted smoothly and yields excellent results.

Transform: Next we’ll step you through the business transformation process. Cirrity understands how challenging it can be to begin selling cloud. We don’t just set you off on your own. Rather, we have extensive processes to help you be successful that go way beyond what other providers offer their resellers.

Training: Your cloud strategy can only be successful when the entire sales and marketing team is knowledgeable about the product set and able and willing to recommend it to customers. Cirrity offers on-site and online training to bring your team up to speed quickly.

Go-To-Market: Getting the word out to your customers that you now offer cloud services can be time-consuming if you have to start from scratch. We provide a wide variety of collateral you can co-brand with Cirrity to help you reach your customers immediately. This includes a web and email marketing automation program that we subsidize as well as “Go-To-Market in a Box” programs that you can execute quickly and easily.

By teaming with Cirrity, you’ll be able to offer not just one service but an entire portfolio of cloud services:

IaaS: Infrastructure as a Service provides the backbone required to operate in the cloud.

DaaS: Desktop as a Service enables your customers to load your applications in the cloud so they run anywhere, anytime, on any device.

DRaaS: Disaster Recovery as a Service, combined with Backup as a Service (BaaS) capabilities enables you to provide your customers with assurance of business continuity even during a catastrophy.

With this portfolio, you can offer your customers greater value through integration that other cloud providers can’t, such as providing IaaS resources protected by DRaaS.

Of course, the best marketing in the world is worth nothing if the product itself is not first rate. That’s why Cirrity’s IaaS, DaaS, and DRaaS cloud services are Cisco Powered. Cisco Powered sets the standard for cloud services. Each service offers enterprise-class performance, security, and reliability. Each service has also been audited by a third party to verify we can deliver to your customers as promised. In addition, as a Cirrity reseller, you can leverage customer recognition of the Cisco Powered designation to accelerate your sales.

The Cirrity platform is also highly secure. Cirrity is audited for all of its security certifications, including HIPAA, ISO 27001, CSA Star, SOC 2, PCI DSS Compliant, and ITAR. A key difference with Cirrity’s certifications compared to other service providers is that many cloud providers only certify the compliance of their data centers. Because Cirrity takes full responsibility for the security of its services, we verify compliance all the way down to our processes as well.

Learn more about how you can offer secure cloud services to your customers with the quality of Cisco Powered through a partnership with Cirrity.

Dr. Steven Vicinanza is Cirrity’s Co-Founder and CEO. Steve has over 30 years of experience in building, managing and delivering IT services to enterprise customers. Steve is responsible for driving the company’s business innovation and strategy. An experienced and accomplished entrepreneur, Steve founded and built one of the Industry’s largest managed services providers prior to launching Cirrity.