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Join CRN Editor Sara Yirrell; Jacqui Davey, vice president of the UK and Ireland Business Partner Organisation at IBM; Tony Lock, programme director at Freeform Dynamics; and John McGuire, chief executive of reseller FreshTL as they debate whether the cloud is here to stay, whether it is a threat to the traditional reseller model and how resellers can actually get involved and make money.
To view the web seminar, click here.
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Do you agree?
The Channel will help make Cloud real
..., initially one would need to agree that "cloud" most likely is not for everyone (i.e. channel partners). Gartner recently claimed that for the foreseeable future ~80% of IT infrastructure transactions are still going to be asset-based, which will cater to a significant portion of the channel partners as is today.
However, one can already see certain IT infrastructure channel partners taking on vendor offerings in their portfolios, which will enable them to gradually embark on the journey to become trusted advisers (and providers) to their customers of cloud based offerings (and with that the services).
From a recent study among Mid Market customers, it is suggested that this segment prefers a gradual migration to "cloud utilization", and this materializes through carving out carefully fenced "IT infrastructure domains" (e.g. certain aspects of Back-Up and Storage) and the associated managed services typically enabled through cloud provisioning. By doing this the channel partner can demonstrate step-by-step that they are capable and also demonstrate the value to the customer.
A (perfect) case study for the above is an ISV in the Storage Intelligence category; the ISV offers Storage Resource Management as a service through VAR's and SI's enabling the channel partners to gradually develop and deploy managed services to help their customers improve business processes and reduce cost - step-by-step. And the solution offers increased profitability (if not incremental), service revenue, annuity business and account control.
Offerings and solution concepts like this will help create acceptance in the channel, or at least part of the channel.
Posted by Kristian Thyregod | 31 Aug 2010
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