Completing the Perfect Recipe for Digital Services

In my last blog post, we followed a cooking analogy to create the perfect recipe for digital services. The approach involved three scenarios: scenario #1, moving from one core asset to many products; scenario #2, focusing on a few high-quality products; and scenario #3, leveraging an ecosystem of local partners. I promised to explore the last scenario in a second blog post. Let’s get started.

Leveraging an ecosystem of local partners

As I stated previously, the recipe for success in cloud for the third scenario involves creating an ecosystem of local partners. With this approach, the mix of ingredients, or selection criteria, for creating a valuable ecosystem will be qualities and characteristics—namely distance, reputation, quality of offerings and margin—that will help you choose partners that fit with your business objectives and values.

Working with local partners has distinct advantages, including their ability to be responsive, provide adequate information about their offerings, offer high margins, be flexible and pivot as needed in making product or business changes in response to market needs.

Turning to startups for more opportunities

In terms of more revenue, another ingredient that can provide more flavor to a winning recipe of working with local partners is to add a dash of startups.

At a time when many small companies are struggling to survive and suffering from a lack of liquidity, large companies have a massive strategic opportunity. By working with local small business communities, large companies not only provide a needed helping hand, but they can also uncover a host of solutions to build an innovative digital services portfolio.

Helping startups in this historic moment not only strengthens your company’s reputation, it also solves some problems a digital service provider faces when embracing the business of digital services reselling.

As I indicated earlier, one of the most important challenges for a digital service reseller is knowledge management of all the portfolio products, both in the sales process and in the post-sales phase. Working with smaller vendors often results in more responsive and faster communication.

Making business easier with faster knowledge transfer

In our culinary example, we’re in the scenario where a farmer starts a new business selling fruit.

Being a local farmer, or local supplier, is not an index of quality per se. The added value is in the ability of a local business to provide better access to information and support.

Therefore, having some local startups in your portfolio, whether they are independent companies or belong to an incubator program, solves many of the challenges in the low-margin business of reselling flagship products.

The local business community startup will help you gain more innovative recipes, or cloud offerings, by accessing their ecosystem, which can strengthen your reputation and bottom-line results.

Digital service providers that invest in a flexible and agile supply chain engine by building sustainable knowledge management processes and betting on innovative products offer a value-added service to their customers, which could help them find a potential standout—the “cherry on top” to a winning approach.

Becoming a master chef solutions provider

At CloudBlue, we enable your success as a digital service provider—no matter which winning recipe or scenario you choose. Starting with the unparalleled CloudBlue platform, creating your own ecosystem is faster and easier than ever.

With CloudBlue, onboarding new solutions is simple and immediate, allowing you to scale the integration complexity based on your sales volume. You can also look to us for expert advice and guidance on other ways to grow your business.

To learn more, reach out to us at together@cloudblue.com.