Azlan denies disties will be locked out of cloud era

Distributors will have valuable function to play if they can prove value, according to Azlan cloud boss Joel Chimoindes

Distribution can act as an essential rung in the supply chain for resellers making the move into selling cloud services, according to Azlan's European cloud boss Joel Chimoindes.

Speaking after the European launch of Azlan's cloud billing platform, StreamOne, Chimoindes strenuously dismissed the notion that distributors will struggle to justify their role in the channel as more revenue moves from on-premise into the cloud.

StreamOne – a partner aggregation and billing platform that has been live in the US for about a year, albeit it in a slightly different form – allows resellers to offer cloud services from the likes of Rackspace, Microsoft and EMC under a single bill.

The platform complements Azlan's wider TDCloud programme, which is designed to get resellers generating revenue from the cloud rapidly by plying them with training and enablement resources, Chimoindes said.

In from out in the cold

Research has shown that most resellers overwhelmingly see working directly with vendors and cloud providers – rather than distributors – as the best route to the cloud.

However, Chimoindes predicted that distribution will be the preferred source where it can prove value-add.

"If all the reseller wants to do is transact cloud services and they have the required in-house skills, tools, professional services and billing systems to do so, they would probably work with the vendor directly," he said. "If they do not have these attributes, this should be the value added by the distributor which is especially true when referring to aggregation of services, either technically or from a billing point of view.

Rival distributor Arrow launched its own cloud billing platform, ArrowSphere, last summer but Chimoindes said StreamOne is different in that it integrates with SAP, meaning resellers do not have to split credit over different platforms.

That said, Chimoindes maintained that StreamOne taken alone is not sufficient to get resellers started in the cloud, highlighting the distributor's drive to educate partners through its TDCloud Academy.

This offers white papers, webinars and – starting this quarter – face-to-face training from the distributor's Basingstoke, Birmingham and Warrington offices.

"When we have had technology changes in the past, most of the time it has been around product – businesses have never really been asked to change the way they sell and report," he said. "[With cloud] how do you bill, how do you compensate staff and how do you market yourself? There are so many things partners have to do and you should not underestimate that – with TDCloud Academy you can provide enough information to get going."

Trickle down

StreamOne initially gives resellers the ability to aggregate cloud services from IaaS outfits Rackspace and AirVM, Microsoft, EMC-owned backup provider Mozy and hosted video player Videxio. Over the coming months, further services will be added in areas such as virtualised desktops and hosted cloud, Chimoindes indicated, while Azlan will also begin offering professional services on behalf of resellers to help customers weigh up how best to migrate to the cloud.

He characterised Azlan as a "cloud aggregator", stressing that it has no plans to own its own datacentres, at least in the immediate future.

Gartner reckons the public cloud market will be worth $131bn (£86.5bn) this year, a fraction of an overall IT market that is set to hit $3.7tn.

But Chimoindes said cloud is more than just hype.

"Every analyst is pointing to at least 20 per cent growth in the UK cloud market over the next few years," he said. "But mid-market resellers are not moving into this space because of the growth we are seeing. They are moving because the end users they have been selling IT to for 10 years are saying ‘now we need to purchase IT in a different way, can you help us'? People look to buy from the people they trust, so we must enable resellers to deliver those services to the end users that trust them.

"No one can ignore the growth of cloud – the industry has not seen growth like it for a very long time."