Office 365 Migration Tools Present Strong Revenue Potential for Channel Partners, says AMI

New York, New York, June 2, 2015 (Newswire.com) - ​Channel partners serving the small and medium business (SMB) space have long sought to open new streams of revenues while maintaining customer trust. As SMBs continue to transition towards the cloud, channel partners are presented with an opportunity to aid customers in the migration process. E-mail and productivity suite migrations are a sensible starting point for SMBs. According to AMI’s newly released white paper Migrating SMB Customers to Office 365: How Channel Partners Can Leverage Migration Tools to Win in the Cloud. U.S. SMB investments in cloud based e-mail and productivity suites are expected to triple from $1.9 billion in 2014 to $6.5 billion in 2019, a CAGR of 28%.

Office 365 is expected to lead this growth as 16% of U.S. SBs (firms with 1-99 employees) and 32% of MBs (firms with 100-999 employees) plan to begin using Office 365 within the next year. SMBs traditionally lack the in-house expertise necessary to complete potentially tedious and time consuming migrations and are looking to channel partners to provide support.

"These vendors have developed migration tools that allow partners to easily move customer e-mail data from on-premise or hosted source servers to Office 365 environments. Each tool presents its own unique features, but channel partners are seeking tools that are simple to use, save time, and maintain data quality."

Rohan Bose, Senior Associate, AMI-Partners

To this end, channel partners can leverage several tools from providers such as BitTitan, Microsoft, and SkyKick. “These vendors have developed migration tools that allow partners to easily move customer e-mail data from on-premise or hosted source servers to Office 365 environments,” says Rohan Bose, Senior Associate at AMI and co-author of the white paper. Bose continues, “Each tool presents its own unique features, but channel partners are seeking tools that are simple to use, save time, and maintain data quality.”

There are two different types of migration tools available to partners today: Data migration tools, which are traditional solutions focused on moving data, and enhanced migration project management solutions that help partners move ancillary workloads in addition to data. The AMI white paper provides detail into the key benefits of each type of migration and an evaluation of partner satisfaction when using tools from BitTitan, Microsoft, and SkyKick. Vendors were evaluated across a number of criteria such as comprehensiveness and quality of data migrated, risk reduction during migrations, overall partner satisfaction, and partner profitability. Partners must consider each of these criteria when selecting a migration tool. 

According to the white paper, 84% of partners mentioned that customers were ‘Likely’ or ‘Very Likely’ to purchase additional cloud services from the partner after a successful migration project. Office 365 migrations present an opportunity to make a favorable impression on customers; failing to do so means losing the customer to a competitor and losing the opportunity to accrue additional streams of revenue.

For more information on AMI’s new white paper 2015 Migrating SMB Customers to Office 365: How Channel Partners Can Leverage Migration Tools to Win in the Cloud, please visit www.ami-partners.com or contact Rohan Bose at (212) 944-5100.

About Access Markets International (AMI) Partners, Inc.

AMI-Partners specializes in IT, Internet, telecommunications and business services strategy, venture capital, and actionable market intelligence—with a strong focus on global small and medium businesses (SMBs), extending into large enterprises and home-based businesses. AMI-Partners’ mission is to empower clients for success with the highest quality data, business strategy perspectives and go-to-market solutions. Led by Andy Bose, the firm has built a world-class management team with deep experience cutting across IT, telecommunications and business services sectors in established and emerging markets.

AMI-Partners have helped shape the go-to-market SMB strategies of more than 150 leading IT, Internet, telecommunications and business services companies. The firm is well known for its IT and Internet adoption-based segmentation of the SMB markets; its annual retainership services based on global SMB tracking surveys in more than 25 countries; and its proprietary database of SMBs and SMB channel partners in the Americas, Europe and Asia-Pacific. The firm invests significantly in collecting survey-based information from several thousand SMBs annually, and is considered the premier source for global SMB trends and analysis.

Media Contacts:

Quoted Analyst:  Rohan Bose. Phone: (212) 944 5100 ext 521. Email: [email protected]

Media Relations: In US (New York): Nancy Carty. Phone: (212) 944 5100 ext 581. Email: [email protected]

                            In Asia Pacific (Singapore): Abhilash Pillai. Phone: (65) 6220 5535 ext 101. Email: [email protected]

                            In India (Kolkata): Jyoti Singh. Phone: (91) 33 4003 3093 ext 223. Email: [email protected]

                            In India (Mumbai): Neha Jalan Goenka. Phone: (91) 99300 20420. Email: [email protected]