Verizon Says Focused Cloud Strategy Working

The idea was to focus on the enterprise and capitalize on features such as Verizon's Secure Cloud Interconnect, an on-demand WAN that provides secure connections to a variety of clouds including AWS, Microsoft, Google, HP, Salesforce.com and of course, Verizon. The company also added a cloud marketplace to make it easier for enterprises to shop for prepackaged cloud-based apps, and developed specific cloud services for customers such as state and local governments. (See Verizon Connects Cloud With On-Demand WAN, Verizon, Unisys Team Up on Cloud for Local, State Governments and Verizon Cloud Marketplace Simplifies Cloud Purchasing.)

Those developments helped lead to 19% cloud services revenue growth in Q1 2015 over Q1 2014, Giunta says and a 10% increase in new cloud customers. (See Verizon Reports Q1 Revenues of $31.98B.)

"We are very happy with our part of the market, with our solutions, with the engagement of the customer," she comments. "We have been maintaining customers that were heritage Verizon and heritage Terremark. But here now we are getting breakthrough customers on our platform. Q2 will be another strong quarter for us."

Selling to strength
Part of that success is the refocused effort by Verizon's sales team to sell to the company's strengths, Giunta says. "We really have understood which are the viable positions that are specific to us that would make us different," she says. "We redirected the sales force to think not of infrastructure as a service but [specific] services, because reliability and high quality are important characteristics of Verizon, when we go to our customers."

Verizon has laid out a series of use cases including Oracle applications, some dev/test, data center extensions, multi-tiered applications, rich media and e-commerce, where it is playing to its strengths.

"We want to be the number one or number two service provider of choice in those areas, and we will compete hard for that," Giunta says. "On dev and test for instance, if it is secure environment, we are going to be there and we are going to win that. There is a huge market in cloud that has not been spoken for yet. Everybody will come to the realization that you can't be everything to everybody and the market will get more fragmented."

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