As the year winds to a close, many companies are taking stock of how things went. Some are looking at their accomplishments and figuring out how to extend those into 2018, while others hope to learn from their mistakes. For businesses like CloudJumper, it’s definitely the former.
The Workspace as a Service (WaaS) provider saw sales of its nWorkSpace platform jump more than 200 percent in 2017 vs. 2016. The company pins the growth to the expansion of its sales channel, which doubled in size in 2017 as more SMBs and midmarket organizations migrated their office environments to the cloud.
The year started off with the acquisition of the business unit of another WaaS provider, according to Max Pruger, chief sales officer, CloudJumper. Pruger says the company spent roughly the first quarter integrating the new business, which included things like billing and support, into the CloudJumper platform.
“I’ve gone through several large acquisitions and I’ll say this is probably the smoothest one that I’ve ever been through,” he tells ChannelE2E.
CloudJumper Partner Momentum
In the last 12 months, CloudJumper has also seen its channel partner count nearly double, further driving 2017’s sales. Over the same period, customer seat count increased 126 percent. When an MSP signs up, it normally takes them three-to-six months until they close their first deal, but Pruger says CloudJumper is looking to make that process easier.
“Our goal here is to teach our MSPs how to fish. It takes an incredible amount of work,” says Pruger. That first deal can be challenging, no doubt, has partners figure out proper sales messaging, and key steps to align WaaS with customer needs.
Still, interest in the WaaS sector continues to grow. An example: The company signed a number of premier channel providers including US Signal, MainFrameIT, Pax8, Impact Networking, and more. The company also launched its JumpStart solution to speed up customer onboarding to the cloud and the Customer Management Modle to help bolster WaaS profitability for partners.
New CloudJumper Initiatives
This year also saw the beginning of two programs: The company’s competitive replacement and disaster recovery plans.
For partners using competitive platforms such as Amazon Workspaces, CloudJumper offers an easy migration path. In the case of the disaster recovery plan, any potential customer impacted by a natural disaster can come onboard the CloudJumper platform. In both cases, new partners and customers receive three free months of service with a one year contract.
With all that growth, the company needed additional accommodations. That led to CloudJumper doubling its North American office space, growing the company’s sales and account management team.
Looking ahead, Pruger says CloudJumper plans to continue on its current growth path. He adds that the firm will likely double its sales team in the new year. We should also be on the look out for some big announcements in the first quarter of 2018. Additionally, there are plans for the 2.0 iteration of the company’s JumpStart solution.
“We’ve taken onboarding times from weeks to days, and we’re looking at taking that from days to potentially hours,” Pruger asserts.
The WaaS Space
As for the overall market, Pruger believes we’ll see more consolidation. “This is a service business. There is definitely huge volumes of scale and I know that we do more volume in one month than some of these other companies have done in their entire five year existence,” he says. “So we’ll see if there’s going to be more acquisitions on that end.”
There are some challenges on the way for MSPs in the WaaS space too, according to Pruger. He predicts that larger telcos will be vying for market share in the near future. Companies like Verizon, AT&T, and others have been moving towards managed services for some time now, but they haven’t been very successful because the nature of the business is more hands-on, Pruger says.
“I can tell you for certain that they can sell Workspace as a Service,” he says. “If there’s one thing that telcos can do, they can bundle.”
There remains opportunities for MSPs in the WaaS area, but Pruger says they’ll need to move faster to take on the larger companies and their vast resources. What MSPs have to offer is their personal relationship. And as the space becomes tighter, service providers will have to lean more into that. “If you’re an MSP and you want to be successful over the next ten years, you need to move to a cloud-first strategy as quickly as possible,” he says. “You need to move your customers to the cloud as quickly as possible because once you do that the switching costs are just extremely high.”
