An Azure Onboarding Guide for Azure value adders

Azure Star Sellers are business value adders. The companies they work with are facing numerous challenges in handling their way through the transitional stage of IT in the most effective manner and the technology wave is forcing them to rethink how their IT model is organized. You, as a Cloud seller and a digital enabler, have the opportunity to become a key asset to help businesses achieve their milestones along the Cloud journey.

Here’s an easy-to-follow resource you can use to complement your sales pitch and assist prospects with the waypoints of their digital migration. The Azure Onboarding Guide for IT Organizations provides guidance and best practices for enterprise IT departments to introduce, consume, and manage Microsoft Azure-based services within their organization. However, since customers usually lack time for training and exploration of the services they purchase, it can also come in handy when Azure sellers want to provide clients with an overview of many of the aspects related to adopting and consuming Microsoft Azure Cloud services.

Every customer comes with a different history that will determine your sales approach and the stages in which the company will develop an enterprise-wide Cloud strategy. ‘Cloud aware’ businesses (“we know it would be good for us, but we’re not yet ready for the public Cloud”) are far apart in their needs from the ‘Cloud experimenters’, the ‘Opportunistic Cloud’ or the growing ‘Cloud first’ enterprises. Each case will require a different IT Cloud deployment and a tailored “digital guidance program”.

Microsoft Azure, gaining momentum in the enterprise

Take large companies, for instance. With hundreds or thousands of applications running perhaps on tens of thousands of virtual machines, some of the key questions they need to answer are: Which applications could be moved? How could they be moved? How should they be prioritized? How does it affect the business? What is most suitable for us: private, hybrid or public?

Those larger businesses have invested in infrastructure and don't what to make it disappear. They need help from Azure sellers to understand the portfolio of options and to realize that a Cloud strategy doesn’t have to be an all-in strategy, especially with Azure. Microsoft Cloud is hybrid ready, and is the leader in doing so, allowing customers to take the best of infrastructure and services capabilities, as well as the best of the platform, such as utilising on-premise servers and extending them to the Cloud.

Microsoft Azure vs. Amazon Web Services

The two leading public Cloud platforms, Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS), each offer businesses a broad and deep set of capabilities that can scale globally to support enterprises. However, there are some significant differences to take into account. The hybrid approach is one of the top advantages to emphasize when pitching the differences between Azure vs. AWS. If a business wants to take a hybrid Cloud direction, Azure has developed these options a lot more than AWS.

In addition, Azure works with the Microsoft technologies that the majority of enterprises already know. This is one of the reasons why Azure is gaining traction among businesses: the extensive adoption of the many Cloud-based subscriptions of Office365 which enables enterprises to begin moving their workloads to the Cloud.

If you’d like to learn more about how Microsoft is redefining Azure for the enterprise, there is an interesting analysis from Forbes which is worth a read.

Azure Sellers for enterprise transformation

Developing a Cloud strategy is a challenging transformative process for most enterprises. It requires careful co-ordination among various stakeholders, from IT to legal departments, from compliance experts to the executive team. To win more customer deals, you will need to effectively pitch Azure capabilities to business decision makers, handle complex sales conversations in different sales scenarios and services of Microsoft Azure, and provide prospective buyers with valuable knowledge.

Take on the transformation path with specialized sales education that focuses on making you a better Azure Seller!