In the beginning of 2014, Finnish hosting company Louhi Networks began recognizing that with the insurgence of global cloud service providers into the local hosting scene, hosting companies would be forced to adapt and re-position their offering or face the prospect of being out-priced and over-run. Companies like Google and Amazon with cloud and AWS servers were making hosting purchases and server setup leaps and bounds easier than ever before. Not to mention scalability, automation and cost effectiveness compared to traditional environments.
As part of a 5 year contract with Pilvi, Louhi Networks worked to improve their digital offering with a new online sales channel enabling a new way to sell all of their product offering through one fully centralized place. With the change their customers can order Domains, Webshops, Virtual Servers, and products from Amazon AWS, F-Secure, Google, Microsoft, Softlayer, alongside their own offering and customer service support.
Louhi represented an early adapter in the hosting field, having recognized the need for change and adaptability in the coming market. Through careful strategizing they chose to implement a self-service model. By automating much of their sales and adding to their offering by reselling some of the most sought after hosting solutions at the time they were able to relieve much of the pressure from traditional field sales, and expand their product portfolio exponentially.
At the time of implementation they set goals of growing their online sales by 20%, now after the first year of use these goals have been reached. At best same month sales jumped by nearly 50% in comparison to their prior solution. They’ve now been able to set further goals in again expanding their product portfolio from the current around 100 to 500 products in 2019, including many SaaS solutions that fulfill modern working environment needs.
Through these changes they were able to position themselves to become a broker of the most sought after global cloud service products, and create a marketplace where new products for resale can be easily added on to. They have not completely abandoned what they do best either, with the influx of new tech and services people will need support in how best to use them. That is why Louhi has been able to keep their customer support team at the forefront while become a virtual one-stop-shop for all of a new business’s needs.
What is self evident, is that a change will always be on the way, often times people resist and fight change, when embracing and adapting could more often than not be the best course of action. Louhi was able to bravely do this, perhaps you in your own business should look in to the same.
“The experts at Pilvi had an excellent understanding of eCommerce as well as deep knowledge of the hosting business and our individual needs. This new webshop is a huge step forward for us. Of particular interest is bringing large international cloud services while offering our local Finnish support, we believe this will be of great interest to our customers as well.”
Says Mikael Kääriäinen of Louhi.
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