Doom, gloom and silver linings beyond the cloud
Cloud champions and cynics alike locked horns at CRN's latest channel event and discussed some strong approaches to the trend
Prophecies of doom notwithstanding, CRN’s cloud forum brainstormed practical benefits and routes to revenue for cloud computing from many vendor, reseller and distributor angles.
Kristof De Spiegeleer, chairman at Zenith Infotech Europe, talked about the need for innovative channel-focused cloud offerings at the Aserver-sponsored event in London.
Businesses cannot switch to cloud computing overnight and the appeal is more obvious for large enterprises. However, De Spiegeleer suggested that a hybrid model using a type of customer premises ‘appliance’will broaden appeal for SMBs.
“If you look at the history of IT adoption in the SMB, they require simple technologies that offer an easy stepping stone with tangible business benefits,” De Spiegeleer said in a statement.
Cloud is capable of replacing all IT infrastructure in an organisation, according to De Spiegeleer, and that is something we will see in the next evolution of cloud, or “Cloud 2.0”.
Simon Aldous, SMB and distribution director at Microsoft, held forth on the advantages for customers – but was keen to impress on the audience that for Microsoft cloud must be all about partnering.
“The biggest opportunity is in the SMB market,” he said. “The cloud will impact all businesses.”
Aldous insisted that VARs would remain key to Microsoft-related cloud services provision, despite fears that the giant would increasingly go direct, cutting out the channel.
“I believe that 90 per cent of our business will continue to be delivered through partners,” Aldous said.
Denise Bryant, UK country manager at Magirus, raised eyebrows when she said that channel players that don’t think about how they will move towards cloud today won’t have a business in three to five years time.
“Points I make today might be controversial, but my job today is to make you think,” she said. “And the problem you have got as VARs is educating end users to think you are the right people to talk to, positioning yourselves as trusted cloud advisors now.”
Bryant talked about the distinctions between private, hybrid and public clouds, and how customers would benefit. She also floated the notion of a community cloud, where groups of end users might buy common cloud business applications as one entity – gaining economies of scale needed to take advantage of cloud offerings.
Cloud offerings will help the channel make more margin and they will support mobile worker productivity. However, buy-in at board level would be needed, so VARs must up their game when it comes to talking real business outcomes to potential customers –not least because customer in-house IT staff might perceive cloud as a threat to their jobs.
Gary Witts, technical services director at Data Store 365, agreed. And its experiences with cloud-based back-up offerings suggested that customers are already benefiting from streamlined agentless management and reduced costs. Meanwhile, the need to manage data better and more efficiently, for all businesses, is continuing to expand – especially as compliance needs develop.
A session by CMS Group’s sales and marketing manager Martin Young and managed services director Darryl White drilled down in how resellers could add value through cloud offerings, and the conference wrapped up with an engaging panel discussion and Q&A on the future outlook with Fabric Technologies, The Cloud Circle, and Bell Micro *(now Avnet).