Cloud migrations remain a challenge, so Box is embedding consultants

Dive Brief:

Box is growing its consulting practices, launching a "white-glove program" that will supply customers with long-term consultants to help implement the company's products, Box announced Tuesday.
The Box Transform program is intended to help customers with particularly "advanced cloud content management use cases." By embedding Box consultants, the company hopes migrations will more easily adopt a client's internal culture and work style without disrupting the client's operations during the migration process.
The more custom approach to cloud migration demonstrates that all projects are not one-size-fits-all, but rather unique to each company. Box wants to drive home its tenets of deploying agile methodologies while supporting long-term content management strategies.

Dive Insight:

Box's consulting practice is nothing new. First introduced in 2013, the practice serves as part of the company's product portfolio that helps with data migration to its cloud-based system.

But the "white-glove" approach to consulting is far more hands on, intended to embed consultants within teams to make cloud migrations easier. Rather than assuming a company can just take on a cloud migration by itself, Box is making resources available internally, which is particularly important for large-scale moves of companies that are not digital natives.

Box's efforts are not unique to technology companies. The old-guard of enterprise technology, such as Oracle and SAP, have long-standing consulting practices that constitute the backbone of their product offerings. Rather than assume other consulting providers have migration expertise in a particular proprietary product, certified experts can facilitate the technology move.

Though some have criticized the proprietary approach to technology in an increasingly open source landscape, the reality is no matter the product, cloud migrations are hard. Around 40% of IT pros say they lack the skills to adopt cloud platforms, according to a recent report from Rackspace and the London School of Economics.

That talent gap does not exist just because talent is hard to fine; even prospective hires lack training on some tools. In response, tech providers are becoming creative in their approach to make product adoption more seamless.

Microsoft, for example, uses its sales team to lure in cloud customers, acting like a R&D lab and consulting practice to demonstrate how technology could be used once implemented.