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4 ways to grow your recurring services business

Your customers’ data volumes are growing, along with the requirements for data protection and continuous availability. Instead of one-off infrastructure investments, customers increasingly want to consume IT as an ongoing service.

For service providers, this creates an opportunity to expand their service portfolio and build new recurring revenue streams around existing customer relationships. Launching new services, however, doesn’t have to mean building new infrastructure or making major changes to your day-to-day operations.

In this guide, we explore four ways to identify new service opportunities and bring them to market as early as this autumn.

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01

Grow with your existing customers

Growth doesn’t always have to come from acquiring new customers. The changing needs of your existing customers can create equally valuable opportunities to expand your service portfolio.

As customers’ IT environments evolve, new needs emerge around storage, data protection and business continuity. As their service provider, you already understand their environments, putting you in a strong position to identify what they may need next.

An existing backup service could be extended with offsite or immutable storage. Growing capacity requirements, in turn, could become an opportunity to offer storage as a recurring service.

Start by asking:

Which services are our customers currently buying elsewhere?

Where are our customers’ data volumes growing?

Which customer needs are not yet covered by our service portfolio?

02

Turn growing data volumes into a recurring service

Data volumes are growing in almost every customer environment. When existing storage reaches its limits, the next step is usually another infrastructure investment. An alternative is to offer capacity as an ongoing service.

Instead of selling customers their next storage system, service providers can provide the capacity they need and build higher-value services around it, such as backup, data protection and recovery.

This turns a one-off infrastructure project into a longer-term service relationship.

Growing data volumes

managed service

recurring revenue

03

Launch a new service without building new infrastructure

Building a new storage or data protection service in-house requires hardware, capacity planning, deployment and ongoing maintenance, all of which require internal resources. The investment is often made before there is certainty about the actual demand for the service.

Service providers don’t, however, need to own all the infrastructure their services are built on. DataOcean provides a ready-to-use storage and backup platform on which you can build your own services. SpaceTime takes care of the infrastructure, capacity and platform operations.

You productize the service and own the customer relationship.

DataOcean

Infrastructure, capacity and operations

Service provider

Service, pricing and customer relationship

Customer

A complete managed service

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04

Bring new services to market faster

If every new service requires building a new infrastructure environment, the journey from an idea to the first billable customer can be a long one.

With a ready-to-use platform, you can start with a few customers whose needs have already been identified. Once the service model is proven, it can be rolled out to more customers while capacity scales with demand.

This allows service providers to test new services with a smaller upfront investment and scale successful service models across multiple customers.

Start with a customer need

productise the service

scale with demand

What can you build on DataOcean?

DataOcean is SpaceTime’s Finnish storage and backup platform for service providers. Rather than simply providing storage capacity to resell, it serves as the infrastructure behind the services you build and deliver to your customers.

Storage-as-a-Service

Provide scalable storage capacity as an ongoing managed service without having to build and operate your own storage infrastructure.

Backup-as-a-Service

Extend your existing backup offering with secure storage capacity and build your own managed service around it.

Ransomware protection

Provide immutable backups for your customers’ critical data and build a robust data protection and recovery service around them.

S3 Object Storage

Provide S3-compatible object storage for backup, archiving, applications and other data requirements.

You don’t need to build every service at once. The best place to start is often one clear need within your existing customer base and a service designed to address it.

What could your next service be?

Data location, control and compliance are becoming increasingly important to customers. DataOcean provides a storage platform operated in Finland, allowing you to make these requirements part of your own service offering without relying on global hyperscalers. Your service is what the customer sees — DataOcean is the infrastructure behind it.

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