Adding Azure to your current offering

In this article, we are going to cover what you need to consider as an MSP when you are planning to offer Azure as a solution stack. The possibilities when utilising Azure are endless, but what intY recommends is to focus on key products that are both appropriate and relevant to your customer base, let’s explore this and the considerations you need to take.

What do I need to consider when adding Azure to my services?

If you’re looking into adding Azure to your current offering, then there are some simple questions you should answer before trying to go to market.

1. Who are we going to be selling to / what is our target market?

Consider customer size, market verticals, current or net-new customers etc, to get an idea of the type of organisations you will be targeting with your Azure offering.

2. What Azure products are we looking to add to our solution stack?

Once you know who your target market is, you can then build an idea of which services will be best aligned with that market. Is it going to be Azure Virtual Desktop, Storage & Backup Solutions, Hosting Apps in Azure, or something completely different?

Look at the key pain points which arise in your target customers or industry and use that as a base for deciding what and how to solve those issues with an Azure based service.

3. How do we align this service with our current offering?

If you already have an offering around Microsoft’s Modern Workplace solutions (Microsoft 365, Teams etc), then you already have a great base for offering Azure services to your customer base. There are a number of easy add-on services such as Azure Virtual Desktop, Security & BCDR [Backup & DR] which will compliment your already established offering.

It’s also worth noting that there are also a number of license benefits for SKUs such as Business Premium covering the licensing requirements for AVD, which make the offering much easier to sell from a commercial perspective.

4. How do I package my solution when I know what I want to offer?

We often see MSPs attempting to sell Azure to their customers as a ‘product’ when the majority of customers (especially SMB’s) are not technical; and often only want to know:

• Will it work and meet both my requirements and expectations?
• Will it be affordable and cost effective?

Considering everything we’ve discussed so far, intY recommend exploring packaged and repeatable solutions. Why not introduce Bronze, Silver and Gold packages, potentially at a fixed cost? There are many benefits to this, including fixed-cost Cloud solutions and therefore predictability. Another advantage of using this method of packaging an Azure solution is that it irradicates the need to create a ‘bespoke’ piece of work for every Azure project you undertake.

If you’re interested in taking the first step into Azure or want to discuss the idea of packaged solutions; the intY Azure Practice is available to all intY partners.

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