How to Deliver Solutions Seamlessly in an XaaS World

Written by: Shannon McWilliams, Global Vice President

From infrastructure as a service to platform as a service — and everything in between — as-a-service and recurring revenue models have proliferated and are here to stay. Legacy technology companies whose businesses were built around on-premises solutions are forced to pivot. With this paradigm shift in service models, distributors like Arrow have had to look at ways to help IT solution and service providers adapt to XaaS models and continue supporting their customers. When there’s nothing to physically ship, technology still must get delivered somehow.

Think about compute and software. Ten years ago, it arrived at its on-prem destination on a truck and the software came as a download with a license agreement and a 25-digit key. Today, it’s likely to be deployed or provisioned in a company’s off-prem AWS, Azure, Google Cloud or Oracle Cloud data center (that is, the company’s cloud tenant). The question distributors ask partners has evolved from, “Where would you like us to ship it?” to, “Where would you like us to deploy it?” It’s a simple — but powerful — distinction. 

Speed and simplicity matter now more than ever. Even through a distributor marketplace, is the job done when the solution is sold and entitlements granted? We don’t think so. Today, IT solution and service providers need to be able to deploy or provision complex multivendor solutions into customer tenants quickly and seamlessly — at scale.

A typical solution blueprint — a standardized solution that addresses a common need — may include a foundational operating system plus the database, storage, security and backup it requires. You need all of it deployed directly into your customer’s tenant in a single motion. This brings incredible velocity to your deals and productivity to your engineers, enabling faster time to tenant consumption and, subsequently, recurring revenue.

Look for Tools to Provision and Deploy Solutions at Scale  

The products and solutions landscape is crowded. Look for tools that can help you serve those solutions up as templatized SKUs — blueprints — that are secure, compliant and easy to provision into your customers’ cloud tenants.

Arrow offers multiple avenues to engage customers and prospects through seamless workload management, deployment and configuration in hybrid multicloud environments. We’d love to chat  about your options when it comes to managing cloud complexity and identifying growth opportunities.

Shannon McWilliams is global vice president of ArrowSphere, Arrow’s award-winning digital distribution platform. McWilliams has nearly 30 years of experience in the technology industry, leading both channel and sales teams.

McWilliams first joined Arrow in 2010, taking on roles within the IBM business unit. He quickly moved across the organization to drive other lines of business, such as virtualization, security and emerging supplier solutions in analytics, big data and security. He took a brief hiatus from Arrow to build a channel business in the location intelligence and data quality space, returning in late 2020 to apply his skills to the cloud platform business across all supplier lines. His innovative approach to the market and to building out high performance teams is the hallmark of his career in technology.

McWilliams holds a bachelor’s degree in accounting from Florida Southern College, and a master’s in business administration from Florida State University, College of Business. He and his wife, Kimberly, live in Tallahassee, Fla., where they raised their two children.

Connect with McWilliams on LinkedIn.

This guest blog is part of a Channel Futures sponsorship.