By Oliver Niemandt, General manager and head of sales, Cloud On Demand
We have done the cloud industry a disservice. Somewhere along the way, the conversation about cloud value got replaced by a conversation about cloud cost. I am not sure exactly when it happened, but I see the consequences of it regularly.
I understand why that happens. Cloud spend is visible; it appears on a line in a budget, and when budgets are under pressure, the line gets scrutinized. But I have come to believe that framing the conversation around cost reduction is one of the most limiting things we do in this industry. It narrows the room, and it almost always leads somewhere nobody really wants to end up.
Cloud efficiency is not about spending less. It is about spending smarter.
There is a real difference. Spending less often means switching things off, consolidating too aggressively or deferring decisions that will cost more later. Spending smarter means understanding what your cloud environment is actually doing, making sure workloads are in the right places, and ensuring that every rand committed to infrastructure is connected to a business outcome you can name. That is a much more interesting conversation, and in my experience it is also a much stickier one.
According to Flexera’s 2025 State of the Cloud Report, 84 percent of organisations cite managing cloud spend as their top cloud challenge, yet many still struggle to translate that visibility into meaningful optimisation strategies.1 That gap between visibility and action is where partners have a genuine opportunity to add value, if they are willing to reframe the conversation.
The shift I encourage partners to make is from optimisation as a discount exercise to optimisation as a value conversation. Instead of opening with what can be cut, start by asking what the cloud is supposed to be enabling. In my experience, that question almost always surfaces something a pure cost review would have missed. A workload in the wrong environment. Resources scaling against assumptions that no longer reflect reality. The result is usually better performance and lower spend at the same time, but more importantly, a client who feels genuinely understood rather than managed.
This matters for retention as much as it matters for revenue. Organisations that experience reliable performance, predictable costs and infrastructure that scales when they need it are far more likely to deepen long-term technology relationships. The opposite is also true. When cloud environments drift, frustration builds quietly and by the time a client raises it the conversation has already become transactional. Optimisation, done continuously rather than reactively, is one of the most effective ways to prevent that from happening.
For partners, the role is not simply to provision infrastructure. It is to help clients understand what they have, whether it is working as hard as it should, and where there is room to do better. That requires a different kind of engagement but it also builds a different kind of relationship, one where the partner is seen as a strategic voice rather than a vendor managing a renewal.
The disservice I mentioned at the start is not irreversible. It just requires someone in the room willing to ask a better question. That is something partners are genuinely well-placed to do, if they are willing to start the conversation different.
