David McLeman, managing director at VAR Ancoris, says migrations to the cloud must be done with great care. Getting it right at the beginning, then following through, remains key. The SaaS sales cycle is much longer than with traditional software sales.

"A lot of our work is about managing the transition of email and collaboration from Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint, Lotus Domino and the like over to Google's platform," he says. "And we are moving much more towards business applications."

Choosing the apps, understanding the whole stack and how it all works, and aligning that directly to customer needs is an ongoing process . Issues may need to be resolved one by one, and customer expectations managed as well, McLeman says.

CRN channelweb.co.uk