Surveying development professionals, managers, and senior leaders across 20 industries, Linode/Akamai found that more than half of the study’s respondents (52%) use credit cards to pay for cloud services, and 48% “want to” use this payment method. 47% employ formal contracts and RFPs.
Alternative payments such as UPI, PayPal, Venmo, and cryptocurrencies, account for one quarter (25%) of payments. Another 36% would like to purchase more cloud services this way. At this point, 9% actually purchase cloud services with cryptocurrencies, and 16% want to do so this way.
Smaller companies are more likely to be buying cloud services via credit cards — 71% of the smallest enterprises in the survey, those with fewer than 50 employees, use credit cards. This compares to 24% of larger concerns with 5,000 to 10,000 employees.
The longer I thought about this story, the more I considered it validation for my comments on e-commerce around the services space. First, are you offering credit card services? Second, are you delivering your services so that customers can order and interact entirely electronically? Do you provide online services through an online store?
I have done several pieces on this before – revisit them at youtube.com/mspradio – and purchasing cloud services via credit card feels like a validation of the strategy. IT services as a whole should be consumable in this way.