Marketing the cloud

Kevin Cochrane gives his view on how to market cloud offerings

Cochrane: Cloud services require a fresh look at marketing messages

Cloud marketing strategies need new messages to cater for the new computing landscape.

While cloud security risks might scare customers off in the short term, this will have little impact as security continues to improve and businesses demand more agile and rapid cloud-based services and IT development.

Without the cloud, real-time interactions would not be available. Cloud is necessary to deliver on the promise of social technologies by enabling companies and partners to scale up quickly and providing the power to build out new products and services.

I have heard that stock will be traded using Facebook and Twitter in the not too distant future.

Offer customers interested in cloud some options, such as application partitioning, infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and hybrid solutions. This will enable them to sample cloud computing without having to change IT partners.

IaaS is a particularly good route for partners as demonstrated by models established by Amazon web services, Terremark’s enterprise cloud and the Rackspace cloud.

Time-to-market is important when it comes to cloud services. If you can offer cloud-based services before your competition, you will not lose out on business or come across as unable to move with the times.

I believe that UK companies are moving to cloud to develop applications more quickly, share the risk and reduce costs.

Getting the message right without compromising core offerings will be critical to the channel’s cloud marketing strategy.

Kevin Cochrane is chief marketing officer at Day Software