In the court of King Consumer

Consumerisation is not going away any time soon and is set to continue to reverberate throughout the B2B channel in 2015, suggests Bob Tarzey

What sort of organisations are most likely to turn to third parties for help with managing and securing their web presence? New research by us on online domain maturity shows it to be those who face the pressure of dealing directly online with consumers.

This is good news for resellers that have evolved their offerings to include managed services because 78 per cent of all organisations are now consumer-facing. Consumer demands are provoking a need for more secure, reliable and flexible platforms on which to build the applications and websites that drive consumer interaction.

All charts copyright Quocirca 2014-2015. All rights reserved.

The top benefits of cloud-based services for consumer-facing organisations are improved security, improved user response times and improved ability to deal with excess capacity - all scoring highly in importance in our survey. These scores are consistently higher than for those for non-consumer-facing organisations that only deal with other businesses.

Managing online consumers is tricky for three reasons. First, the numbers involved: on average consumer-facing organisations have three times as many registered external users as non-consumer-facing counterparts. The highest numbers are in financial services, the lowest in manufacturing.

The second reason is that consumers are capricious; given a poor experience, they are not prepared to waste their time and will try elsewhere. Business users are more patient - after all, it is their employers' time being wasted, not their own.

The third reason is payments. B2B transactions are usually via pre-agreed lines of credit, whereas consumer transactions tend to be paid for on the spot. This brings consumer-facing organisations into the scope of the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS), which mandates either strict security requirements or the outsourcing of payments altogether.

Charts copyright Quocirca 2014-2015 All rights reserved

Vulnerability to security threats is the number-two worry for consumer-facing organisations regarding their online services, after the user experience itself.

Resellers that understand the pressure for customers of dealing directly with consumers and with the relevant offerings will be pushing against an open door. Consumer-facing organisations are almost twice as likely to be increasing their budget for online-resource support as non-consumer-facing ones.

They are much more likely to invest in capabilities such as user experience (UX) monitoring, user-related web analytics and linking customer behaviour to the bottom line. Consumer-facing organisations are also more interested in granular measurement of the likes of connection speed, devices, browser and location, as these can all affect the UX.

They are also more likely to put a premium on aspects of security such as fraud detection, DDoS protection, or security information and event management (SIEM).

And they are more likely to outsource infrastructure requirements, such as the hosting of websites and online applications as well as related services such as domain name service (DNS) management and content distribution. Consumer-facing organisations are also more likely to outsource all their security requirements.

Charts copyright Quocirca 2014-2015. All rights reserved.

Using online resources to interact with external users has become critical in most sectors, and success requires a mature approach to the way online domains are managed.

For many IT departments this has led to a relentless focus on serving front-line business requirements as well as high-level application delivery.

Infrastructure needs are being trusted to third-party experts. This is true for the overwhelming majority of businesses, but those that deal with consumers are feeling the pressure most.

For resellers, our findings suggest a clear message too.

The future is not about selling low-margin tin and infrastructure software for IT departments to string together in in-house datacentres. It is about providing high-performance, flexible and secure platforms for online application delivery. Welcome to the world of king consumer.

The related Quocirca report, sponsored by Neustar, "Online domain maturity", is downloadable free for CRN/ChannelWeb readers.

Bob Tarzey is an analyst and director at Quocirca