In recent years we have seen an increase in businesses looking to the as-a-Service (aaS) or subscription model, often driven by the need to digitally transform. While this shows no signs of changing, as Daniel Teixeira, leader of systems engineering at Pure Storage explains, one of the key and often forgotten elements of such a model is service.

He points out that there is a crucial difference between products on subscription and a true service. To that end he sights the customer service industry, and solutions driven by the gig economy in particular.

“Consumer-oriented grocery deliveries, shipping services, videoconferencing and entertainment solutions all have seen tremendously accelerated adoption in the months since the onset of the pandemic. These services, in turn, are convincing reasons to adopt IT infrastructure as a service, as well as cloud and sophisticated third-party logistics services,” he highlights.

“Getting what you need, when you need it, and only paying for what you use are the new standards by which businesses are measured,” adds Teixiera.

Looking at things from the enterprise perspective, he says that software, platform and IT infrastructure delivered as-a-Service is affording organisations greater control over spending than ever before.

With this in mind, Teixeira notes that South African enterprise data centre solution customers are asking five important questions:

• Can I consume your solutions as a service?
• What choice do I have when my organisation is billed?
• Can you charge me only for what I use?
• Do you offer an off-site/colocation option?
• Can you manage this solution from start to finish?

“This last point is absolutely key – the wraparound package of management and services makes all the difference to a successful aaS offering. The subscription economy has made it so easy for a customer to sign up for a service and then discontinue it in favour of a different one if it doesn’t meet the customer’s needs, so aaS models have to earn a customer’s business every day and with every interaction,” he stresses.

New expectations

Looking to the future of service-driven models, Teixeira highlights five areas that businesses in this space should be aware of.

The first is solutions that open up capacity to deal with customer issues and deliver better service as a result. “Look for IT spending to increase for any transformational technology that will enable more automation and provide faster time to problem-solve insights through analytics,” he advises.

Next, rather curiously, is that subscription and as-a-Service are not interchangeable terms. “Especially for enterprise offerings, true aaS solutions are about buying a service with built-in benchmarks (or service-level objectives),” notes Teixeira.

He then shifts to the importance of transparency, with customers taking the time to read the fine print as he terms it. Here, he explains that, ”

Service providers should expect customers to read the fine print – and reward them if they do so, with real transparency. What’s the price? How long is the commitment? Are they expected to sign a 24-month contract? Transparency will increasingly be rewarded in the aaS economy, so make these details easy to find on your website.”

The fourth element to be aware of is customer expectations and a desire to lean into them. “With the proliferation of colocation data centres in South Africa, there is now a trend where customers would rather have infrastructure off-site and close to major hyperscale infrastructure,” explains Teixeira.

“This gives customers the best of all worlds, allowing them to scale down their own data centre use, move or outsource their on-premises workloads to a colocation and have it almost side by side with AWS or Azure infrastructure in order to reduce latency,” he adds.

Finally the Pure Storage team leader highlights the potential of 5G, which has long been touted as a transformative technology for the edge. While we await its widespread availability in SA, Teixeira says, “5G has tremendous benefits that will fuel the market for aaS IT solutions, as it takes applications that were in the data centre or in the cloud and creates the potential for hyper-localisation.”

“Consider the impact on personalisation that 5G will have on retail, for example. Now imagine a sports retailer spinning up an application that provides an interesting in-stadium user experience for people who are rugby fans by using 5G and Edge locations. That’s a very seasonal experience, and most of the Edge and 5G technologies that support it are being consumed as a service, because they tend to be transient,” he concludes.

[Image – Photo by Erik Mclean on Unsplash]