NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--In the high growth cloud services market, every advantage helps. Five key channel partner competencies help make them indispensable and highly profitable here. A new report from AMI-Partners shows that channel partners with one or more of the five competencies are expected to capture the lions’ share of this growth opportunity over the next two years.
“High-value competency (HVC) partners drive 3 times the market opportunity compared to other SMB partners,” says Avinash Arun, Director of SMB Channels at AMI-Partners, “and the margins they derive from these key solutions are about 25% higher than other partners.” A critical distinguishing factor of HVC partners is their commitment to the cloud. HVC partners are also 3 times as likely to already be experiencing success in the cloud, from a business and financial perspective. “Their success in the cloud is critical to the sustainability and growth of the partner ecosystem,” says Arun, “and to vendors who are betting heavily on this transformation.”
AMI’s “U.S. SMB Partner Competencies Assessment” turns the spotlight on these partners that have proactively invested in developing their skill sets, knowledge and expertise around these 5 competencies. The competencies include business analytics, unified communication & collaboration, business process management, mobility and infrastructure alignment. Among the 72,000 partners in the U.S. who focus on the SMB segment, only 20% are currently proficient in two or more of the high-value competencies.
HVC partners tend to work with SMBs in high-value industries, including financial services and healthcare. The breadth of product offerings, coupled with vertical specialization, allows these partners to cater to a more sophisticated SMB clientele, helping them drive operational efficiencies, enhance productivity and reduce IT complexity.
Some of the key solutions offered by HVC partners include business intelligence, CRM, unified communications, virtualization, IaaS and mobility applications. In addition to profiling HVC partner segments, the AMI report also provides a comparison of leading vendors’ relationships with HVC partners.
Related Study
AMI’s “U.S. SMB Partner Competencies Assessment” report focuses on five key partner competencies driving growth and creating high-value for vendors. The report profiles partners with these competencies to help vendors benchmark, identify and target partners based on solutions focus and capabilities.
To inquire or learn more about these studies, please contact Avinash Arun, Director of Channels at 212-944-5100 or at aarun@ami-partners.com
About Access Markets International (AMI) Partners, Inc.
AMI-Partners specializes in IT, Internet, telecommunications and business services strategy, venture capital, and actionable market intelligence — with a strong focus on global small and medium businesses (SMBs), and extending into large enterprises and home-based businesses. The AMI-Partners mission is to empower clients for success with the highest quality data, business strategy perspectives and “go-to-market” solutions. AMI was founded in 1996. Since its inception, the firm has built a world-class management team, each with ten to fifteen years’ experience in IT, telecom, online communications or multimedia.
AMI-Partners has helped shape the go-to-market SMB strategies of more than 150 leading IT, internet, telecommunications and business services companies. The firm is well known for its IT and internet adoption-based segmentation of the SMB markets; its annual retainership services based on global SMB tracking surveys in more than 30 countries; and its proprietary database of SMBs, Cloud services studies and SMB channel partners in the Americas, Europe and Asia-Pacific. The firm invests significantly in collecting survey-based information from several thousand SMBs annually, and is considered the premier source for global SMB trends and analysis.