Today we feature a discussion between our Global Strategy Leader for the OVHcloud Partner Program, David Devine, and Yethrib Hilmi, Head of Development at our UK partner The Genius Group.

Hi there, great to catch up. Can you both introduce yourselves briefly?

Yethrib: I’m Yethrib Hilmi, Head of Development at Claimtech, part of The Genius Group. We are the UK’s largest agency for creating and onboarding signed clients, having successfully onboarded over 7 million clients for major UK companies—driving billions in revenue for the legal, financial, and insurance sectors.

Our expertise spans AML, KYC, soft search technology, biometric authentication, and e-signature management, making us the go-to digital partner for businesses that require compliant, high-volume, and frictionless client onboarding solutions.

Uptime, stability, and security are at the core of what we do—which is why we rely on OVHcloud to power our infrastructure. With OVHcloud’s scalable and secure cloud solutions, we can process millions of transactions while maintaining unmatched reliability and performance for our clients. We work alongside industry giants such as Experian, and our reputation for cutting-edge technology, compliance automation, and seamless client acquisition has earned us multiple industry-leading awards, including the Website Traffic Generation Specialists of the Year, and Client Service Excellence Award winners 2025.

David: I’m David Devine, Global Strategy Leader for the OVHcloud Partner Program. I work closely on the strategy for our program across the world, making sure that we’re supporting all of our partners in the best possible way.

We enable partners to add value to their customers, using our exceptional price/performance ratio, with predictable costs and open source technology, all built upon our sustainable and sovereign cloud products.

What’s it been like working with OVHcloud?

Yethrib: Our experience of partnering with OVHcloud has been outstanding. Firstly, their programme is incredibly welcoming and supportive. We’ve consistently found that it provides invaluable assistance in meeting our dedicated server needs. The partnership team keeps us updated on their latest offerings, ensuring we can continue to deliver cutting-edge technology and exceptional value to our clients.

David: We’re really happy to hear that, thanks Yethrib. We’ve worked hard to make sure our program provides benefits for all of our partners, but we also make sure that we support them on an individual basis. That can mean sales support, product advice, technical workshops, guidance on design or even the future product roadmap and how that sits with the partner portfolio.

What impact has OVHcloud made on your business?

Yethrib: The reliability of OVHcloud’s uptime SLAs has been a game changer to our business, directly contributing to a 500% increase in turnover across our group activities over the past year. Their strong uptime record demonstrates their commitment and dedication to providing exemplary customer service.

David: We’ve invested heavily in support staff, not to mention our ongoing resiliency program across our datacentres, so it’s great to hear the positive and direct impact this is delivering to our partners and customers. In particular, our Erith datacentre saw a number of updates and upgrades last year to ensure that it was at the top of its game.

And what’s your experience of the partner programme been like?

Yethrib: The dedicated partner programme has enabled us to establish a strong infrastructure and framework supporting scalable and efficient business operations, ensuring we can deliver both optimal client results and training programmes where necessary. Partnering with OVHcloud empowers us to confidently meet the demands of our business and clients.

David: That’s definitely our aim, and we try to make sure that we’re regularly spending time with our partners, listening to their needs and planning how we can support their next growth ambitions. Working particularly closely with Yethrib and his team, we have utilised the training program to help empower knowledge. Ultimately, our job is to understand partner needs and support their growth, so having a close relationship is a must. A key focus of our ethos is to ensure we are accessible to our partners at all times, for example enabling partners to speak directly with our technical team to help align a customer’s requirement with the correct solution design, so that it’s right first time.  We need to know what’s driving their business so we can work out how best to support them – there’s no such thing as a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach at OVHcloud!

Yethrib, David, thank you, it’s been a pleasure!

But before you grab your axe and scramble for the nearest beanstalk, it’s important to survey the scene and make sure that you’re heading for a cash cow rather than being left holding a handful of dry beans.

Metaphors duly stretched, today we take a closer look at the opportunities this presents for the channel with Gilles Closset, our global AI ecosystem leader. Gilles is instrumental in helping our partner community distinguish between the hype and the practical opportunities AI offers and brings a wealth of customer insights.

Gilles, thanks for joining us – let’s kick off.

Q1. Which industries are using AI the most: who are the early adopters? Why are they using it and what business outcomes are they looking for?  

GC: Healthcare is one sector where we’re seeing huge growth, largely because of AI’s potential to help people live longer, take better care of them and reduce administrative burdens. A lot of AI in healthcare doesn’t depend on GenAI, and we see a lot of startups in this area, mostly based more on the traditional machine learning industry.

We also see significant AI uptake in Manufacturing, mostly in the optimisation of production processes. With its heritage in Kaizen and Six Sigma, manufacturing has always seen a strong appetite in this area. The sector is also starting to embrace predictive maintenance, using both digital twin and machine learning technology.

Thirdly,the Retail industry has embraced a mix of GenAI and machine learning to improve customer interactions using chatbots, sales optimisation and hyper-personalisation. AI is allowing every brand to offer the kind of personalised experience that was previously restricted to luxury brands; it has the power to absorb a lot of data points about customers and provide a far more customised experience across the areas of both sales and customer support.

Finally, we see a great amount of AI adoption in the Financial sector, particularly in the areas of fraud detection and personalised engagement. The financial sector has historically been enthusiastic about machine learning for improving KYC (Know Your Customer) processes, and AI can really accelerate this.

Q2. What are other customers really looking for when it comes to AI? What are they adopting, and what are the best opportunities for VARs and MSPs in AI today?

GC: We see a lot of potential from AI to improve efficiency and personalisation, draw together data from different customer journeys and integrate it. As I said above, customers are increasingly expecting a highly integrated approach when it comes to their relationship with brands – and AI enables everyone to do this.

We also hear a lot of questions from customers about data handling; from ethical principles to cloud audits and hands-on management, there’s a lot of opportunity for partners to support customers. It’s still early days in terms of adoption, but this is a clear opportunity for partners to get ahead, show differentiation and stand out.

Q3. Turning to the market main challenges, what themes are customers struggling with the most and need help from VARs and MSPs to support them?

GC: One major challenge we’ve seen is to go beyond a POC – we see a lot of exploratory initiatives, but then they don’t scale!

At the same time, data quality is a challenge. A lot of organisations have legacy systems that weren’t designed to work with AI, so there’s a real need for modernisation. IDC’s latest findings predict an unprecedented YoY growth of 97% in AI compute and storage hardware infrastructure to support this adoption. This area already is a vast area of investment, currently valued at $47.4b. We see a lot of projects to update and extract data from old systems, and partners who can support with this are in a position to significantly drive their customers forward in terms of AI maturity.

Finally – and this is linked to the previous point: we are seeing a big talent gap. AI is a new industry, so organisations are still developing their skills. There are two main ways to address this: you can either help a customer to address the gap directly and deliver workshops and training, or you can provide the end customer with people to do the work on a temporary basis.

All of this requires a transformation plan and can be daunting, but it does represent a major opportunity to add value. Furthermore, these projects will usually start with data literacy, making sure people understand the potential of AI, getting buy-in, and then you’re off!

Q4. What are your top tips for partners starting to explore the possibilities of AI for their customers?

GC:

1: Mind the skills gap: Upskill your own team or help to skill up the customer.

2: Know how to tackle topics around data quality and governance. Good data is the foundation for all good AI – and as the old saying goes, Garbage In, Garbage Out.

3: Use UK or European organisations where you can. We see lots of feedback from partners who are trying to differentiate from the hyperscalers in terms of price, data protection (especially around sovereignty and vulnerability to extra-territorial laws) and working with a European player will make this much easier.

Gilles, many thanks for your time, and very useful insights. From what we’ve heard, AI certainly offers prospects of gargantuan proportions and, like many new rapid-growth market cycles, once you’ve separated the wheat from the chaff (or beans from the stalks), climbing up to the giant’s AI tech lair is a significant opportunity for partners. As always, it’s important to listen to what customers are doing and understand their broader strategic and technical landscape, but in the long term, embracing the AI opportunity can uncover new business treasures you never knew existed!

Since the dawn of cloud, customers have spent hours, days and weeks deciding which cloud environment is right for them and their IT estate. The channel has been an intrinsic part of this evaluation, with partners supporting their customers and helping them make the right decision for their own specific needs.  

Today, cloud is not only a mature technology, but it’s an interoperable one as well. Organisations use multiple clouds for different applications and workloads, selecting best of breed vendors to fit their needs. This multi-cloud approach is fast becoming the norm. We recently surveyed over 500 technology buyers from the UK, and almost two thirds (62%) are actively using multi-cloud environments today. A further 23% are either transitioning to multi-cloud or exploring the possibility of multi-cloud in future.  

Although there are a number of organisations that do use a single cloud provider, a staggering 65% of organisations say that their use of multi-cloud will increase in the next two years, representing a huge opportunity for the channel. Mixing and matching workloads to the right cloud environments can bring benefits, but also brings more complexity, with integration into other applications and a greater number of endpoints to secure. Around a third (31%) of IT decision makers said that they were concerned about securing their multi-cloud environments, and 27% understood that multi-cloud would make their estates considerably more complex. 

So what does this mean for the channel? How do channel partners adapt to address these market dynamics? Partners can provide invaluable experience and value to customers, helping to tame their multi-cloud environments. By getting to know a customer’s infrastructure, helping them to choose the right vendors and giving good consultancy, channel partners can not only help customers transition to multi-cloud effectively, but build both long-term relationships and long-term margin, in particular by adding complementary support and consultancy services.  

We’re at a key inflection point and the time to act is now. Three quarters of respondents stated they need more support and expertise, with only a quarter of organisations see multi-cloud as ‘plain sailing’. Around half (46%) are ‘getting there, one step at a time’, with a fifth (20%) admitting that if multi-cloud was a relationship status, theirs would be ‘it’s complicated’.  

But whether your customer is a mature multi-cloud user or just starting down the road, it’s almost certainly a journey that they won’t diverge from, and as their complexity grows, so will a desire to seek help from channel partners. The benefits of multi-cloud are well understood: in our poll of over five hundred customers, only one believed that there were no benefits to multi-cloud. Everyone else knew that using the right cloud for the job could give you better flexibility, better portability, lower risk and better cost-effectiveness.  

And with those kinds of benefits on offer, it’s quite clear that we’re going to be living in a multi-cloud future, and the channel opportunities are there for the taking.  

The Importance of Security and Cost

For the channel, it’s simultaneously a challenge and an opportunity; according to new research from the Cloud Industry Forum, 38% of customers would reject a channel partner with a poor ESG strategy. We see this as well – many customers are monitoring their scope one and two emissions, but increasing numbers are also measuring their scope three (supply chain) emissions, which changes how they buy from the channel. However, although this is a significant proportion, sustainability has yet to achieve parity with other factors such as cost and security. According to the same study, over half (56%) of customers said that security was their top priority for forthcoming IT projects, and 54% had put projects on hold because of the current economy.

It is heartening to see sustainability rising up the customer agenda, despite the difficult economic times, and as we’ve said, it shows that organisations are regarding it differently. Sustainability is now a method of cost control and increasing competitiveness, rather than something woolly – although it does come with the challenge of what roll channel partners should play as the middleman to giving customers greater visibility of the carbon footprint of technology vendors in turn.

Navigating the Challenge of Sustainability

This isn’t straightforward at all: vendors use different metrics across different timeframes, and although there are globally ratified standards for the likes of PuE and WuE, not all vendors will subscribe to this measurement methodology – and no standard exists for CuE. There are a number of ways to navigate the labyrinth, but resellers will no doubt find themselves asking more questions to their vendors, and more to the point, being increasingly careful about their choice of vendors.

However, the statistics also tell us a reassuring story. 90% of customers today believe that cloud is as secure or more secure than on-premises, and 87% say that cloud has saved them money. 96% say that cloud has delivered against their expectations, proving that the cloud is an established and mature technology.

Opportunities for Resellers

And as we know, many customers have migrated applications to the cloud already: database, CRM and customer-facing apps are usually the first choices, but other parts of the business can be more difficult. To be successful, it’s important that channel partners show an in-depth understanding of customer needs, and offer them a choice of solutions for supporting these needs. The right cloud for the right workload is crucial, for example, and that means having a broad range of providers in a partner’s portfolio, not to mention a commitment to open standards to make hybrid or multi-cloud infrastructure easier to manage in the long-term.

On a more specific level, the CIF report also shed light on the individual challenges that resellers could help customers to overcome. For example, over a third of customers admitted that they lacked the skills to move their cloud projects forward. Furthermore, almost two thirds [65%] said that migration to cloud was often more complex than they expected.

This is a clear opportunity for the channel to step in, helping customers to overcome these issues, adding significant value. Although sustainability might not yet be on a par with security or cost in terms of procurement priorities, savvy organisations that have one eye on the horizon and start to get their sustainability approach will be first in line to reap the rewards in future. 

The good news for IT resellers is that 74%² of end customers agree either somewhat or significantly that the channel plays a crucial role in helping them overcome the increasing complexity of cloud migration. For resellers, the main questions to address are, “in the eyes of an end customer, what does an ideal trusted channel cloud provider look like” and “what’s the best way to deliver against these needs”?

To answer these questions, it’s essential to firstly explore what is driving cloud adoption and creating the complexity. There are many statistics that demonstration the rate of cloud adoption is accelerating. IDC, for example, forecasts that 42 Zeta bytes of data will be stored in the cloud by 2025, noting an accelerated shift to a cloud centric infrastructure at twice the rate as before the pandemic. To demonstrate the speed of growth, in a recent survey undertaken by CRN and OVHcloud², 64% of respondents stated that more than half of their data will reside in the cloud in two years’ time compared to 32% today. 

Why Business Intelligence and Apps are driving cloud adoption

Respondents to the research survey, cited two main drivers behind the shift to cloud. Firstly, the need for more business intelligence and data analytics, which by nature requires flexible compute and data resources that can scale quickly, yet can be switched off when no longer needed to reduce unnecessary IT costs. Cloud is inherently favorable to fulfil this need unlike on-premises. 

Secondly, the location of application users has changed since before the pandemic. Traditionally, staff would be primarily located in an office to access systems that were all contained within an office network.  The growing popularity of a remote workforce has resulted in staff accessing systems and data off-premises. Equally, the recent growth in customer digital interactions and new online services is creating new applications. Enabling access to these workloads from the cloud makes a lot of sense from a user experience, performance and cost perspective.

Customers’ main cloud strategy challenges

The growing trend of cloud adoption has proven over time that the benefits of improved IT scalability and agility by far outweigh the drawbacks. Customers are, however, still faced with overcoming several main challenges to truly deliver the full value of cloud.

1. Cost

In our recent survey cost is still the primary issue, driven by complex vendor pricing structures, a lack of cost transparency and predictability. As organisations adopt a multi-cloud and hybrid cloud model, many struggle to obtain sufficient technical and commercial best practice knowledge across different providers and platforms to optimise their cloud estate.

Predicting the costs for data storage and access has also become more difficult. As many IT leaders have experienced, the initial ROI for a cloud solution may be compelling, but as the solution matures accurately predicting and budgeting for future costs is a significant challenge due to a lack of price transparency and growing ingress charges.

2. Data security and compliance

The types of data organisations store in the cloud has changed. Customer interactions have become a digital, online experience, collecting more personal data, which in turn is being used in business analytics tools to enhance the customer experience and streamline processes. These more sensitive, personal data sets need to be treated differently to other non-personal data to ensure compliance with local data privacy and sovereignty laws. This is highlighted In particular between Europe and the US, where guarantees that data does not leave a particular jurisdiction is required.

In addition to data localisation, to remain compliant with European data protection laws the cloud provider’s head office is a factor. For example, if the head office is located in the US, it is governed by US Cloud Act irrespective of where the data itself is stored or processed.

3. Integration and application migration

The next most prevalent challenges highlighted in the survey were linked to concerns using open source versus closed source cloud infrastructures. This is echoed by the The State of the Public Cloud in the Enterprise, report by Contino (Oct 2020), in which 63% of respondents cited vendor lock in as a major concern. Perhaps due to a lack of choice or awareness of different cloud vendors, or for technical reasons, many end customers have procured cloud solutions using closed source technologies, which has inadvertently stifled their hybrid or multi cloud strategy.

There is an abundance of reports that highlight open source software are growing more rapidly than closed source, as organisations enjoy the benefits of being able to further improve ROI through greater software development, customisation and migration. In addition, it provides customers the freedom to migrate applications to improve performance or achieve a better price performance. Yet many 

How channel resellers can accelerate their success

Today, the way in which end customers think about their cloud strategy and procurement process is very different compared to a few years ago. As organisations embark on their digital transformation strategy, they have learnt lots about the benefits and limits of cloud and how it can best work for them. Organisations understand not one cloud fits all and the need to adopt a hybrid-cloud and multi-cloud approach to their IT strategy. In summary, customers want to understand the various choices available to them. 

As a result, customers more frequently need their IT value added reseller partners to help create and manage cloud infrastructure; co-creating solutions that leverage the benefits of hybrid cloud and multi-cloud, identifying ways to reduce costs such as suggesting alternative cloud providers, offering customer choice with multiple cloud vendors, offering additional services such as cloud audits, managing transformation projects and in-life support.

Channel partners who have adopted these themes into their cloud services to differentiate their business, enjoy improved customer loyalty and greater customer acquisition, showing a clear path to outperform the multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud megatrend.

To find out more, read our latest Research paper: Dream IT partner: What end users need most from their channel cloud providers.

References

¹ In 2021 (Flexera)

² Dream IT partner: What end users need most from their channel cloud providers, CRN and OVHcloud

³ 2022 State of Open Source Report, Open Source Initiative (OSI) and Perforce Software