Partners in Australia and New Zealand ‘drink the Kool-Aid’ when it comes to adopting vendor-led trends in IT, according to Canalys chief executive Steve Brazier.
During his company’s Canalys Channels Forum event in Hong Kong last week, the analyst firm CEO mentioned that in the Asia-Pacific, IT customers were hesitant to adopt subscription-based pricing models, despite constant pressure from vendors to make the shift.
But when asked later by CRN whether that was relevant for Australia, Brazier painted a different picture.
“I think of Australia and New Zealand as the two countries in the world that like to drink the Kool-Aid,” he said during an analyst meeting.
“They go quickly to new stuff without thinking and sometimes that’s to their advantage and sometimes it isn’t. In many things, you are the most advanced, ahead of the US, ahead of the UK.
“As somebody who runs a business, I hate subscriptions. I don’t want to be locked in. We want to buy stuff when we have the cash to buy stuff, but we don’t want to pay every month, so we do everything we can to avoid it.”
Most subscription pricing models in Australian IT are currently associated with software as a service such as Salesforce, SAP, and Office 365 - as well as public cloud services from the likes of Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google.
SaaS spending in Australia is projected to reach $3.3 billion in 2019, up 24 percent from this year’s $2.6 billion, while infrastructure-as-a-service is forecast to reach $652 million, a 27 percent increase from $511 million in 2018.
Global revenue for the infrastructure as a service segment is forecast to hit US$39.5 billion, up 27.6 percent from US$31 billion. SaaS is also the largest segment globally with revenue forecast to reach US$85.1 billion in 2019, compared to this year’s US$72.2 billion.
But the preferred pricing models of SaaS and IaaS are also making their way into other walks of IT.
Device as a service has made its way into the market, as major distributors such as Ingram Micro and Synnex established hardware-as-a-service programs.
Microsoft has also launched a service to give customers the option to have the software giant manage their devices, including pushing out feature updates and security updates.
As an as-a-service solution, the Microsoft Managed Desktop (MMD) will be sold as a per-user monthly subscription fee based on the size of customer and device type.
MMD has already started rolling out to select customers in the US and UK, and will arrive in Australia early next year, as well as Canada and New Zealand.
The journalist travelled to Hong Kong as a guest of Canalys.
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