We are honored to announce that Channel Partner Insight has awarded 2nd Watch the Customer Satisfaction Award for 2020! With this award, Channel Partner Insight has recognized 2nd Watch for its ability to help large enterprises move to and use public cloud platforms, with the highest customer satisfaction.
The Channel Innovation Awards powered by Channel Partner Insight are designed to honor the partners and vendors that have brought true value and innovation to the managed services market. During a year of unprecedented disruption and change for all businesses across the globe, MSPs have become invaluable allies to large enterprises. With the COVID-19 pandemic forcing organizations to digitally transform their businesses almost overnight, technology has never been a more important asset to continue and further their success. The 2020 Channel Innovation Award winners are the vendors and partners who have provided a lifeline and made a real difference to their customers over the last 12 months.
“We are grateful to Channel Partner Insight for this award and extremely proud of the work we’re doing on behalf of our clients,” said Jim Nolan, Director of Field Client Services at 2nd Watch. “This award is recognition of our status as a trusted partner to the largest enterprises, many of which accelerated their use of cloud services in 2020 due to conditions created by COVID-19.”
We’d like to thank all our clients for a successful 2020 and our growing partnerships, new and ongoing, and we look forward to progressing together in the year ahead.
Today, we’re excited to announce a new enhancement to our Managed Optimization service – Spot Instance and Container Optimization – for enterprise IT departments looking to more thoughtfully allocate cloud resources and carefully manage cloud spend.
Enterprises using cloud infrastructure and services today are seeing higher cloud costs than anticipated due to factors such as cloud sprawl, shadow IT, improper allocation of cloud resources, and a failure to use the most efficient resource based on workload. To address these concerns, we take a holistic approach to Optimization and have partnered with Spot by NetApp to enhance our Managed Optimization service.
The service works by recommending workloads that can take advantage of the cost savings associated with running instances, VMs and containers on “spot” resources. A spot resource is an unused cloud resource that is available for sale in a marketplace for less than the on-demand price. Because spot resources enable users to request unused EC2 instances or VMs to run their workloads at steep discounts, users can significantly lower their cloud compute costs, up to 90% by some measures. To deliver its service, we’re partnering with Spot, whose cloud automation and optimization solutions help companies maximize return on their cloud investments.
“Early on, spot resources were difficult to manage, but the tasks associated with managing them can now be automated, making the use of spot a smart approach to curbing cloud costs,” says Chris Garvey, EVP of Product at 2nd Watch. “Typically, non-mission critical workloads such as development and staging have been able to take advantage of the cost savings of spot instances.
By combining 2nd Watch’s expert professional services, managed cloud experience and solutions from Spot by NetApp, 2nd Watch has been able to help companies use spot resources to run production environments.”
“Spot by NetApp is thrilled to be working with partners like 2nd Watch to help customers maximize the value of their cloud investment,” says Amiram Shachar, Vice President and General Manager of Spot by NetApp. “Working together, we’re helping organizations go beyond one-off optimization projects to instead ensure continuous optimization of their cloud environment using Spot’s unique technology. With this new offering, 2nd Watch demonstrates a keen understanding of this critical customer need and is leveraging the best technology in the market to address it.”
How has the impact of the current pandemic affected your IT organization? Our recent Enterprise Cloud Trends survey sheds light on how IT leaders are reacting. Here are 4 key findings that provide insight into areas you should be considering.
Does your organization have a glass half full or a glass half empty view? In the recent Enterprise Cloud Trends survey sponsored by 2nd Watch, one half of respondents was confident in their IT organization’s ability to deal with COVID-19 related uncertainty. Which means the other half has concerns with their organization’s ability. So where do you stand? Half full or half empty?
IT has felt the impact of COVID-19 to their business as acutely as any other department. Yet, the latest Enterprise Cloud Trends survey conducted by 2nd Watch indicates that IT has proven to be the most resilient and adaptable of all organizations. Although clear that IT leaders have had to adjust their priorities, they are embracing big-picture efforts that lead to true business transformation and position their companies for long-term success, in spite of the challenges.
The report sheds light on a variety of topics important to IT including the roles of IT in supporting the business due to COVID-19 impact, post pandemic budgets, and how IT is positioning itself to be successful over the next 12 months. Six key findings the report highlights include:
Support for remote workers is the top enterprise IT challenge
Companies are accelerating digital transformation and cloud use
Pre COVID-19 cloud budgets remain mostly intact and are expected to grow
Cloud security is a growing concern
There is a shift to more permanent remote workers
Some cloud related technologies will emerge stronger than ever
Support for remote workers
Have you felt the impact of supporting remote workers? Survey respondents indicated that remote worker access into corporate systems and managing the complexity and support of remote workers were the biggest challenge they have faced. The shift of supporting a growing number of remote workers is a recurring theme through out the report.
Accelerating digital transformation
Surprising to the authors, enterprises are accelerating digital transformation and cloud use. Survey responses indicated that 40% of IT departments are accelerating their digital transformation efforts. Progressive companies see this time as a way to embrace tools to better connect with customers and achieve faster time-to-market.
Cloud budget impact
How has your IT budget been impacted by COVID-19? A majority of the respondents indicated that their budget has either remained the same or grown, with more growth forecasted over the next 12 months. IT is seen as the organization that can lead.
Rising security concern
With growth in supporting remote workers and cloud spend comes a growing concern in cloud security. Over 75% of respondents indicated that cloud security is a top priority. It’s only logical that the increased access provided to employees will lead to additional security concerns.
Shift to remote workers
Although security is of concern to supporting remote workers, businesses are moving more employees to permanent remote status. Survey responses indicated that there will be an 11.8% increase in permanent remote workers. And IT is at the forefront of supporting this shift.
Cloud related technologies are the focus
Four distinct technologies seem to be getting more focus as we shift to a post-COVID-19 environment, including:
Data Management / Analysis
Edge Computing
Content Delivery Networks
Multi-Cloud Solutions
Conclusion
IT is being called on to enable their companies to not only survive the business impact of COVID-19, but to thrive. Download the 2nd Watch Enterprise Cloud Trends report to gain insight from your peers and justification for making the strategic moves to support your business’ strategic initiatives going forward.
We are excited to officially share that we have joined the Google Cloud Partner Advantage Program, giving Google Cloud customers access to our 2nd Watch services and cloud experts!
We are building our Google Cloud practice in response to growing demand for the platform in the marketplace. Our team already has multiple Google Cloud certifications, including for hybrid cloud infrastructure with Anthos and hybrid cloud service mesh with Anthos, and we are actively hiring to support a strong Google Cloud sales pipeline. As part of the Google Cloud Partner Advantage Program, we will guide clients’ Google Cloud migration efforts as well as their optimization, DevOps, analytics, and innovative architecture projects.
“By joining the Google Cloud Partner Advantage Program, we enable our clients’ multi-cloud strategies, offering cloud infrastructure for specific workloads and providing the exemplary experience our clients have come to expect,” said Rich Lyons, Director of Field Alliances at 2nd Watch. “We’re seeing increased demand for Google Cloud in the marketplace, particularly among food services, financial services and manufacturing companies. We look forward to working closely with Google Cloud to serve the needs of our customers.”
By participating in Partner Advantage, companies can harness the power of the Google brand, the innovation of Google products, and the energy of the Google Cloud ecosystem to capitalize on the growing cloud computing opportunity across all segments: Small and Medium Business (SMB), Corporate, or Enterprise. With access to information, training and tools, the program will enable 2nd Watch to meet the unique needs of its customers.
We are extremely proud to be able to share that our Net Promoter Score® (NPS) increased for the fourth year in a row to the highest it has been in five years, an 85! To give you an idea of what that means, NPS scores vary across industries, but a score of 50 or more is generally deemed excellent, and anything over 70 is considered exceptional. The average score for the services industry tends to fall between 40-50.
Net Promoter Score
2nd Watch’s NPS of 85 means 85% of surveyed clients indicated an extreme willingness to recommend 2nd Watch’s cloud services. Since 2018, three-quarters or more of all 2nd Watch clients who participated in NPS surveys said they are extremely satisfied with 2nd Watch, and about three-quarters of surveyed 2nd Watch clients said the firm’s services are of the highest value.
“2nd Watch has been an excellent business partner to Yamaha in assisting us to manage our AWS environment. The team is very aware of our operations and needs. The 2nd Watch team is a trusted partner that helps us keep the business growing,” said Brent Brodowski, Director of Infrastructure at Yamaha.
“We are grateful for the feedback of our clients and pleased to have earned their recommendation,” said Doug McMaster, EVP of Managed Cloud Services at 2nd Watch. “The data is useful in that it helps us understand what we’re doing well and opportunities for improvement. As always, 2nd Watch strives to help its clients grow their businesses, reduce costs and increase efficiencies using public cloud infrastructure, related tools and methods.”
NPS is a management tool that can be used to gauge the loyalty of an organization’s customer relationships. It serves as an alternative to traditional customer satisfaction research and is claimed to be correlated with revenue growth. NPS has been widely adopted, with more than two thirds of Fortune 1000 companies using the metric. The tool aims to measure the loyalty that exists between a provider and a consumer.
