One man's cloud...

Chris Gabriel of Logicalis argues that ISVs should see the cloud as a Channel-as-a-Service

If the cloud is going to disrupt the traditional IT supply chain, moving us from solution to service, and from buy and build to provision and consume, then, while it poses a threat to those wedded to a business model based on shipping tin and software licences, it opens up a new opportunity for those who can change their delivery model to be cloud enabled.

We recently connected our Tier 3+ datacentre and cloud service to the Joint Academic Network (JANET), and are already starting to see that other suppliers to the education sector see the cloud as a new route to market for their existing services, and one that could lower their cost base and provide an easier way to gain market share.

The JANET network connects UK universities, FE colleges, research councils, specialist colleges and adult and community learning providers, with over 18 million end users currently served by the network.

So, the connection of a cloud capable of running most application workloads offers a very interesting proposition to those channel partners who specifically deliver software applications to the education community.

If you wanted to sell your software to every single university and further education college in the UK, you could knock on every single door, convince the institution that your software is the solution they need, and then persuade the ICT department to build a server and storage infrastructure for your specific application, or provision some capacity on an existing server. It's amazing how many niche software vendors you meet who have a great product, but, who cannot scale their offering or scale their business model to reach the whole of their potential audience.

Well, with cloud, and connections to powerful networks such as JANET, the wares of an ISV in the education market can be made available to the whole community. No more dedicated infrastructure in the end users' datacentre, but ubiquitous access to the entire market.

The cloud isn't free, of course, and either the software provider or the institution has to fund the capacity, but, it's shared, and it's ready-made, so time to market is minimal, and scalability of the marketing opportunity is virtually unlimited.

At a time when universities and the public sector as a whole are under significant budget pressure, an ISV who is looking to grow their market share may not simply find cloud attractive, they may find it their only viable route for growth.

JANET is one of the UK's finest examples of how a connectivity platform can become a services marketplace, connecting the end user community and the ICT solutions providers in a way that reduces complexity, reduces cost, and allows rapid delivery of innovative new software solutions and consumption models.

Perhaps we should rename CaaS from Compute-as-a-Service to Channel-as-a-Service?

Chris Gabriel (pictured) is solutions and marketing director at Logicalis UK

Read more from Chris throughout this week on Views from the channel