Nextcloud as strategic choice for communication service providers and cloud providers

How to grow as a cloud and service provider?

Cloud service providers and hosting businesses need a long-term growth strategy, expanding the audience while retaining satisfied customers. When a collaboration platform is one of your key services, offering diverse products that you can own, scale, customize and build on top of helps achieve this.

Upselling is the most reliable way to increase revenue

Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) increased through upselling and cross-selling directly translates to your increased revenue, helps offset customer acquisition costs, and lets you allocate more resources for support, technology, and marketing.

It is much easier to upsell to your existing customers who are already engaged with your products and have made a choice they are happy with. Since you’ve established a relationship with the customer, the marketing costs associated with upselling are typically lower. It also has a lot to do with value perception: upselling helps customers see the additional value they can get by spending a bit more.

Upselling often opens opportunities for cross-selling related products or services as well. This can diversify a customer’s purchase and further contribute to revenue growth. The key to successful upsell strategy lays in your products and the ability to customize and integrate them with other apps and environments you are offering within your service provider infrastructure.

Own the product

When you resell cloud products provided by big, famous companies like Microsoft or Google under their name, you certainly get ready awareness and an easy marketing leverage. However, your company remains an intermediate agent between the user and the vendor, putting your own margins at risk in the long term.

Relying on vendor’s authority over the product and support services puts you out of control. The product can be withdrawn or discontinued, the vendor might slash reseller margins, and the customer may leave your business while continuing to use the solution.

When you really own the product, you own the customer. Offering solutions that you can manage, customize and ship under your name are the only guarantee to long term, stable profitability. Deliver services under your contract for as long as you are ready to — by working with open source technology providers.

In the cloud, scale is everything

If you are investing in growth of your own infrastructure, the best strategy is to utilize it and offer products that run on your own platform, fully belonging to you.

This approach not only maximizes the return on your infrastructure investment but also provides a unique selling proposition for your business. By developing and offering products that are tightly integrated with your own platform, you gain a competitive edge in terms of customization, performance, and seamless user experience.

Building your product ecosystem on your infrastructure also fosters a sense of brand loyalty. Customers who find value in your platform are more likely to stick with your services over time. As they become familiar with the seamless integration of products and the consistent quality, they are less inclined to switch to competitors who may not offer the same level of synergy.

With Nextcloud collaboration platform, you leverage even more

Nextcloud Hub is a fully integrated collaboration platform easy to use, deploy and maintain. Fine-tuned towards interoperability and customization, it can work as a stand-alone solution or compliment any ecosystem of apps.

Nextcloud is ready to add a robust, privacy-first option to your stack even for the most demanding and heavily-regulated industries. It works well in bundles within a milti-vendor strategy thanks to already developed integrations — for example, with Microsoft products, Slack, Trello, and more.

Open API and support for external apps in any language lets you expand your offering beyond existing integrations, making it a great fit for your upselling and cross-selling strategy.

Finally, Nextcloud is about privacy and compliance — something that the most demanding industries rely on. You can leverage the existing infrastructure or host it via a managed service, and add an extra security layer with end-to-end encryption, Nextcloud Guard monitoring, and other tools at your service.

There is a clear demand from organizations and policy makers for better protection of customers’ data, more transparency around security and data storage and respect for privacy from cloud vendors. In response, Telekom and Nextcloud have partnered up to provide an open source, 100% EU hosted, transparent and privacy respecting collaboration platform.

Hagen Rickmann

Managing Director Business Customers at Telekom Deutschland

Privacy-first all-in-one collaboration hub

Modern interface and ultimate synergy between the apps deliver seamless experience to users seeking comfort. Nextcloud combines multiple core tools that can be further augmented with integrations:

• File synchronization and sharing
• Document editing and collaboration
• Mail communication, online chat and video conferencing
• Project and task planning
• Knowledge management
• A vast ecosystem of integration-ready apps
• Mobile and desktop applications

Scale globally with local data

After clusters hit tens to hundreds of thousands of users, scaling with the standard architecture gets progressively harder. Key components like storage and databases struggle to serve, requiring more expensive solutions.

Nextcloud Global Scale tackles these limitations, offering an architecture that combines independent nodes in a reliable, resilient global instance. Designed for easy scaling to hundreds of millions of users across dozens of data centers and multiple continents, data can be kept local and moved where it is needed to ensure optimal latency and compliance.

Work with all verticals

Tens of millions pick Nextcloud as a versatile software that gives them collaboration capabilities they need with full control over their data. Business, educational organizations and public sector leverage reliable and compliant solutions while users enjoy performance and accessibility. With Nextcloud, you can work in B2B and B2C alike and target any vertical.

78 service providers, telecoms and cloud companies worldwide choose Nextcloud

IONOS

With more than eight million customer contracts, IONOS is the major European provider of cloud infrastructure, cloud services and hosting services.

Deutsche Telekom

Deutsche Telekom is one of the world’s top telecommunications companies, with some 235.8 million mobile customers, 27,3 million fixed-network lines, and 21.3 million broadband lines.

OVHcloud

With more than 400,000 servers spread across over 33 data centers on 4 continents, OVHcloud is now a global player and Europe’s leading cloud service provider.

Grow together with Nextcloud

At Nextcloud, we maintain a stable development cycle and offer user-centered products. We also provide innovative, sought-after collaboration platform features all year round. And we keep experimenting: investing in our own AI capabilities, collaborating with independent developers to grow our app library, and nurturing a vast, loyal community. With 60% increase in bookings over the last year, Nextcloud is a steadily growing platform that helps millions.