Service Provider Insider

Live From London: The EMC EMEA SP Summit

It was a good week last week.  I was fortunate enough to help out at EMC's first-ever EMEA service provider summit.  Many thanks to Richard Bradbury and his team for a wonderful event.

For those of you who are interested in the whole IT-as-a-service provider thing, I wanted to recap a few key learnings for those who couldn't attend.

Sticky Is Good

I was in another of my wide-open, full-throttle discussions the other day -- this one about IT service provider business models -- and I started ranting about "stickiness". 

Someone in the meeting made a face, and I had to stop and explain that -- in this world -- stickiness is one of those gotta-get-it-right strategic topics that should really matter to any SP.

If you aren't familiar with the term, it's creating incentives (rather than barriers) to keep your current customers your current customers.  Done poorly, it results in "churn" -- people leaving your service for one they like better.

Telecom operators (another form of service provider!) understand these concepts all too well.  Indeed, there are stories of CEOs being asked to leave because they didn't get the stickiness equation right.

So, how does these concepts apply in our burgeoning IT-as-a-service space?