Transform Boxes to Bytes to succeed in the XaaS economy

IT distributors play a crucial role in the supply chain. Their capabilities have enabled them to orchestrate a complex physical network of warehouses, delivery routes, and channel partners to provide the infrastructure and tools needed to run businesses across the globe.

However, they are finding it increasingly difficult to differentiate themselves from their competitors, negotiate favorable price points with MSPs and resellers and benefit from the flexibility and agility of subscription-based sales.

In the as-a-service era, organizations are turning to cloud services such as infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and anything as a service (XaaS) to replace on-premise infrastructure and business applications. This shift creates opportunities for distributors to offer higher value solutions and services that generate annual recurring revenue (ARR). These are becoming a challenge to fulfill for the more traditional IT distributor with legacy systems and processes.

The good news is that this transformation to an as-a-service model puts IT distributors in a prime position to transfer and expand their existing operations to grow their margins and use economies of scale to triumph in the cloud economy. One way to achieve greater efficiency is using a platform like CloudBlue Connect, which enables distributors to automate and streamline their business, eliminating costly processes and accelerating time to revenue.

Distributors are also making acquisitions either to expand geographically or to create new lines of business. Through the acquisition of data centers, they can complement their physical offering with cloud services and potentially subscription-ready XaaS offerings, making them available to their global channel. In order to maximize these acquisitions and reduce the complexity inherent in the M&A process, they should centralize all operations through one platform, ideally, one that enables them to manage a multi-tiered channel.