3 Top Vertical Sales Ops for Virtual Workspaces

If you aren’t aggressively pursuing desktop-as-a-service or hosted workspace opportunities, it’s time to kick it into high gear. A June study by Transparency Market Research projects a 12.1 percent CAGR for workspace as a service sales between now and 2022, resulting in a market valued at $18.37 billion.

Besides providing modern workspace options, by positioning virtual desktops with your customers, you can initiate a larger conversation to open up the opportunity for complimentary offerings including app virtualization, managed services, and system integration.

Unsure where to start? There are three verticals where we see real growth opportunity for channel partners.

Financial Services: Businesses in the financial sector are prime candidates for cloud-hosted desktops. The financial industry runs on data, so tools that can increase access to information, securely, will prove to be a valuable commodity.

Of course, since financial institutions are subject to data privacy laws and other industry regulations, partners must ensure that any systems you recommend to these customers meet compliance muster and have security checks in place.

In these cases, be vigilant and select a supplier that utilizes secure and compliant infrastructure. Once security is accounted for, financial institutions can grant their employees access to data and applications – including QuickBooks – from virtually anywhere. This can improve employee productivity and efficiency since with a virtual desktop, applications can be accessed from a number of devices; besides desktops, tablets and Chromebooks are often supported.

Health care: The cloud-migration trend in health care makes it perhaps the most publicized of the industries using desktops as a service today. With mandates and government incentives, health-care organizations are encouraged to take their systems into the digital era. Cloud presents an ideal platform to achieve this, while also meeting the evolving standard of patient care.

Desktop-as-a-service solutions in particular can help health-care organizations achieve mobility – an objective long held but rarely realized by many of these firms – since workers can access their virtual desktops from multiple devices that can be stationed at various sites of care administration. These desktops can be loaded with billing, archiving tools and a myriad of apps to better execute both patient care and back-end operations.

Retail: This is one industry that has been driven to cloud adoption by increased competition. The emergence of major online players, and the convenience they offer, have changed consumer expectation of how retailers should operate. Consumers demand a personalized experience; intelligent purchasing systems; and fast, customized service. Desktop-as-a-service solutions can help deliver this level of service.

Ready to Sell?

Before calling on customers, ask your cloud vendors for sales sheets, objection handling and other resources to empower your sales efforts. The cloud market is constantly evolving, so it’s prudent to stay savvy.

With research indicating double-digit growth for the workspaces-as-a-service market over the next few years, and PC sales still on the decline, the entire channel ecosystem is looking to how to offer this solution to customers. The key to winning is to be ahead of the market — and not caught off guard.

Ali Din is GM and CMO at dinCloud, a cloud services provider that helps organizations rapidly migrate their IT infrastructure to the cloud. Ali’s IT industry career in the last 20 years has spanned product development, finance, and most recently, marketing and brand management. For more information, visit: www.dincloud.com or follow @dinCloud on Twitter.