Cashing in on the Long Tail

I currently work for a Tech company. I started five years ago almost to the day. Our offerings at the time were largely ruled by network management for our client base. Typically we spent several hours a week onsite at the client to manage all things related to their technology needs. Our revenues at the time were largely driven by our engineers billing hours to the clients. This is a tried and true model that has endured for years for many professional services organizations.

In early 2008 we acquired a company that specialized in an offering called Managed Services (MSP). This was the start of our shift to cloud offerings and our first venture into a business model that was capable of venturing down the long tail. Today we are primarily and MSP as well as managing a Data Center that enables us to offer Cloud services to companies of all sizes from one and two person shops up to hundreds of simultaneous users.

I consider the small 1-5 person companies in the long tail for a tech company of our size. After reading The Long Tail I would like to see us expand our current offerings to include cloud based services that individuals could use. If we were to offer something like cloud based data backup or smartphone integration services to individuals this would move us into a much larger market. Automation of this entire process so that software could handles the entire purchase, setup and billing would enable complete electronic delivery and lower per unit cost to near zero.