Verticals find us.
Many IT service providers at some point set about determining what vertical markets they should focus on. Some spend tremendous amounts of time and energy working to determine which would be best, and where they can find subject-matter experts to add to their staff to provide credibility and industry insight.
Take a look at your own customer base. Categorize each customer by industry; then total how many customers you have in each industry type. It’s likely you’ll discover that a vertical industry has already found you. That is, you have won many customers in the same vertical industry without realizing it.
Deliver Desktops-as-a-Service (DaaS) to your verticals.
Now that you know you have this momentum, go with it. The best way to cement yourself into any customer environment is by becoming their DaaS provider. Now you are delivering literally everything to their desktops, laptops and palmtops. Because you’re using Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), you not only have complete control over their environment, and the best platform for supporting their users, but you also have extensive utilization data that will serve your customers well as they plan future IT investments.
By delivering DaaS to your identified vertical markets, you can provide pre-packaged, pre-planned, pre-defined business-ready services that take the guesswork and deliberation out of the process of acquiring your services. Make it easy for those vertical customers to buy.
Once you are your vertical customer’s DaaS resource, there are many additional services you will be able to successfully offer, including:
- Native apps — With more users moving to smartphones and tablets, the hunger for native apps that take fullest possible advantage of each device grows. New platforms and providers make it easy for you to port applications over to a more mobile-friendly interface. Some deliver the mobile interface along with the standard desktop User Interface (UI) automatically.
- Specialized business services — Different industries and professions use different services… differently. With your knowledge and expertise, you can configure communication services, fax services, research services and more that are specifically designed to facilitate each vertical’s specific needs.
- Cloud storage — The value customers can obtain from a given cloud storage service depends most strongly upon how they use them. Provide training and templates to help your vertical customers take best advantage of online cloud storage, document and data management services.
- Communications and collaboration — With more mobile users than ever, bringing people together to work in teams translates into high value, especially when they no longer need to travel to do so, and when their communications are carried across the Internet instead of expensive phone or other lines.
- Specialized support programs — Supporting a user often requires more than only product knowledge. When the support provider is familiar with the specific ways in which their customers use their software, that support is taken to a whole new level of productivity.
DaaS is an extraordinary strategy for embedding your IT service provider practice most deeply into your customers’ ecosystems. With highly efficient, highly secure VDI delivery of desktops and data, built-in shadow support capability, instant upgrades and updates on the server with immediate distribution to all users, monitoring, management and metrics all built in, you can do a lot, learn a lot and dramatically improve your ability to serve each of your customers.