Public Cloud Channel Partners Forecast Robust 2019 Growth

Channel partners are banking on continued robust vendor growth by Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud as they forecast double-digit revenue increases this year, fueled by a far-from-mature market for enterprises shifting to the public cloud.

Pinnacle Technology Partners Inc., a newly minted AWS Advanced Consulting Partner, looks to eclipse AWS’ growth after a hefty double-digit uptick in revenue last year.

“If we can outpace our partner, then we’re doing pretty well,” managing partner Ethan Simmons said.

The Norwood, Mass.-based company, a consulting and managed service provider specializing in cloud migration, saw its annual revenue grow 77 percent last year from the prior-year period.

“We had tremendous growth last year in our business with AWS,” Simmons said. “This year, we’re looking to pretty much triple what we did last year.”

Pinnacle is hiring account executives and AWS cloud architects to underpin its growth. It also partners with Microsoft Azure and is in the process of becoming a Google Cloud partner.

Pinnacle expects momentum from new clients adopting a cloud-first strategy and existing clients’ increased adoption of cloud services.

“The first part of the adoption strategy is getting the customer on our cloud governance platform,” Simmons said. “It gives customers visibility, security and cost optimization of their AWS environment. What we’re seeing is once customers are on (the platform), they’re more likely to move more workloads out to AWS.”

Eighty percent year-over-year growth is forecast for Los Angeles-based Mission, a managed cloud and consulting company partnered with AWS. Mission saw organic annual growth of about 60 percent last year.

“Amazon’s own growth is in the 45 percent range annually, so it’s still growing incredibly strong,” Mission founder and CEO Simon Anderson said. “We’re just being brought into a lot of new opportunities, and we’re also finding a lot of opportunities for new workloads with existing customers.”

The challenge for Mission is one of complexity, according to Anderson.

“The platform has many services to choose from and many approaches to build a new application or run an application,” Anderson said. “The challenge is to ensure that the customers really understand all of the services, and we help them make the best choices so their apps are performing, are flexible and secure, and can continue to be developed in a very agile fashion.”

Next-generation services that are of strong interest to customers include containers, serverless and Windows workload, according to Anderson.

“We continue to see customers who want to deploy artificial intelligence and machine learnings for their applications,” he said. “That’s going to continue to be a big trend.”

Mission has 85 employees after adding about 35 last year and hopes to bring on another 20 to 25 mostly service delivery technical hires to fill consulting, cloud operations and DevOps engineering roles.

New York City-based Logicworks, a managed service provider specializing in cloud compliance for highly regulated industries, expects to grow by about 8 percent to 10 percent per quarter, according to CEO Kenneth Ziegler.

The company, an AWS Premier Consulting Partner and Azure Gold Expert MSP Partner, derives 80 percent of its revenue from public cloud managed services.

“We’re targeting…approximately 35 percent growth for the full year,” Ziegler said. “Our services are wrapped around AWS and Azure, and so our growth will be a function of the continued adoption of the AWS and Azure platforms.”

After doubling its business last year, Minneapolis cloud product development company Agosto, a pure-play Google partner, is hoping for a repeat performance in 2019.

The first quarter is mirroring what president Aric Bandy witnessed the previous two years: rapid quarter-over-quarter growth as Google Cloud – under former CEO Diane Greene and new chief Thomas Kurian -- gets aggressive on winning big customers and not letting AWS and Microsoft Azure beat it on pricing and technical features.

“What I’ve seen in quarter one is pretty substantial growth, particularly in infrastructure and platform service,” said Bandy, whose company is a Tier 1 Google Cloud Premier Partner. “Everybody is going cloud first, and Google is a significant player now in that space.”

Bandy is encouraged by Kurian and believes Google’s quarter-over-quarter growth will outpace that of AWS and Micrsosoft Azure.

“That translates then to quarter-over-quarter growth to my company,” he said. “If Google grows, we grow.”

OST, a Grand Rapids, Mich.-based business technology consulting firm, has a strong outlook for the year when it comes to the public cloud, with a projected 10 percent to 20 percent revenue increase.

“We’re seeing the need to look at costs and operational structure, and agility and speed to market, as two tipping points for public cloud,” said Michael Lomonaco, marketing director at OST, which specializes in digital transformation and operational optimization for enterprises.