Westcon-Comstor’s Jacquie Young: Cloud vendor programs complicated

With 29 years in the IT industry, Westcon-Comstor Asia Pacific (APAC) cloud managing director Jacquie Young believes cloud vendor programs are more complicated and harder to navigate for newer partners these days.

Young told ARN she was at an event for a vendor and someone suggested a good TED Talk topic would be how to get started as a partner with cloud vendors.

“Partners can white label these competencies from us to deliver services like [Amazon Web Services’ (AWS)] Well-Architected Framework and the Migration Acceleration Program,” she said.

“If a partner is new and hasn’t developed these competencies yet (and it can take them up to two years to do so), they can lean on our services to deliver that expertise upfront and develop the competency over time.

“Once they’ve developed it, we can step back if they want to handle those services on their own going forward.”

Young also said managing cloud distribution is unique; if Westcon-Comstor tried to manage it the same way it manages traditional distribution it “wouldn’t work”.

“You need a deep understanding of this segment, the vendors and the specific value-added services,” she said. “Moving into cloud is more complex than moving into other areas, such as networking or collaboration tech.

“If you’re not working with someone who specialises in the cloud space, it can be difficult. At [Westcon-Comstor], we’ve centralised our cloud team across the Asia Pacific region to ensure consistency and avoid the challenges of managing a traditional distribution model.”

Young said before Westcon-Comstor introduced its competencies, she saw partners cautiously considering whether they should collaborate to deliver the full solution a customer needs.

This is a key part of the value distribution brings to cloud, she noted; helping new partners get started or augmenting the service capacity for partners who may have the competencies but not enough people to ramp up or scale for specific projects.

It can take up to two years to develop that level of competency, with Young adding they can lean on Westcon-Comstor’s services to deliver it up front, while developing the competency themselves over time.

“At that point, we can step back if they’re wanting to deliver all of those services ongoing,” she said.

Best cloud practices

These initiatives will become vital as, according to Westcon-Comstor’s latest Mastering the Maze report, 89 per cent of Australia-based partners see developing a cloud practice as a priority, but nearly half feel they lack the tech right technical skills to meet customer needs.

Released in early March, ARN reported that more than two thirds (68 per cent) of local partners said their customers are looking for specialised cloud skills, but only 52 per cent are confident in fulfilling this demand, with the remaining 48 per cent describing skill shortages as a challenge.

According to Young, the findings suggest that partners know where they need to develop their cloud capabilities, with the challenge being finding the right support to plug those gaps.

“We have the technical capability to advise customers and partners on what they need to consider when migrating to the cloud,” she said. “Of course, each project is different, but we follow best practices to guide customers and partners in making the right choices during the migration process.”

This ties into the costs of moving to the cloud, offering the benefit of reassuring the end user, who can trust they’re following a proven approach, and the vendor, who gains confidence that channel partners are competent in managing the migration.

“In the cloud space, there are partners who have been doing this for a while and have developed cloud skills, as well as others who may be new to the cloud but have established customer relationships and want to assist with migrations,” she said. “When doing these migrations, customers often don’t see any savings in the first year.”

“You’ve probably seen that it’s 36 per cent cheaper to move from on-prem to the cloud, but during the first year, customers may not experience that. This is common because, over time, infrastructure will undergo modernisation.”

Customers will start optimising their licensing and getting rid of unused licenses, which is much easier to do in the cloud.

According to Young, as customers move more workloads and gain economies of scale, they can change who is managing their cloud infrastructure since some responsibilities shift to the cloud.

“If customers don’t just migrate but also modernise, they will see better economic returns on their shift to the cloud, but it’s crucial to avoid viewing it as a one-year lift and shift,” she said.

“Customers who do that won’t realise the long-term benefits.”

Secure AI push to cloud

This migration to cloud is driven by preparations to adopt artificial intelligence (AI), noted Young, even if its in an early testing phase. Some businesses may be more advanced in their AI use, but at the very least, it’s pushing the adoption of cloud storage.

“For these enterprise AI tools to function properly, they need to access data hosted on the cloud. Even if customers aren’t fully migrating to AI yet, CEOs are pushing for it,” she said. “As a result, many businesses are looking at what data or workloads they can move to the cloud to start experimenting with AI.

“A common starting point is migrating backups from on-premises storage to the cloud.”

This doesn’t require a complete shift of all compute resources, which could lead to more downtime, and allows companies to begin testing AI tools with data that’s now stored in the cloud.

Before an organisation even gets started however, it needs to get rid of data that’s inaccurate, as it will give an inaccurate response.

“You’d absolutely want to make sure that it’s all cleaned up before using it to give an educated answer,” Young said. “In general, AI in its early stages is being used to automate mundane activities.

“These are tasks that AI tools can handle, saving people a lot of time. Over time, this will evolve into more advanced uses, such as software or code development, and even AI-driven product development.”

For example, AI can help guide decisions about what a product should be based on what it has learned.

It’s also important when using AI in an enterprise setting to have security guardrails in place.

“When you upload any data into AI tools, especially public ones, there’s no built-in mechanism to forget that data,” explained Young. “To protect sensitive information, you’ll need the enterprise version of AI tools, which ensures that the data you upload remains secure and is only used for your enterprise’s purposes, not shared publicly.”

Security is also part of every conversation Young has around cloud migration.

“Since we have both migration and security consulting competencies, these elements are embedded into everything we do, ensuring we guide partners through best practices,” she added.