Take back the cloud opportunity
It is time for the channel to step up and reiterate its value in a cloudier world, notes Paul Heywood
Lately, VARs have been sidestepped by on-demand cloud services from the likes of Amazon and Rackspace as well as carriers and mid-market MSPs which had previously courted the channel for attractive revenue contributions.
Vendor-led services have rapidly taken control of large parts of the market through increased functionality and commercial efficiency - essentially locking the channel out.
This, however, does not mean the channel is irrelevant.
When the multitude of cloud offerings we see today was first implemented in the late 90s, the option to build or buy was available to most vendors, and the market chose to build. But now end users want choice and platform agnosticism is the name of the game.
The strain on the channel began when the vendor demographic fell down the food chain to the SMB. Many of the larger early-adopter web-scale businesses were lost to self-provision Amazon-type web services.
This time, rightly or wrongly, the seemingly tech-savvy SMB market followed suit. So it has become tougher for the channel as a value proposition that was previously centred on demystifying IT diminishes. Consumerisation is increasing confidence in doing it yourself.
Initially, lots of testing and development projects used cloud services, as well as short-term projects that had definitive start and stop dates. The perceived benefits of a pay-as-you-go model and infinite scale meant that "renting" IT via cloud resources made sense.
Although security, stability, resilience and compliance are still questioned, there is an increased willingness to migrate non-core services to cloud.
This has also increased enterprises' desire for SaaS-based third-party offerings, instead of traditional proprietary business application software builds or installation agreements.
With those born in the cloud, SMB markets and some early adopters in the enterprise leading the way, cloud-based services such as compute, storage, SaaS and others have become crucial components of IT departments everywhere. Cloud services are also becoming part of complex corporate global networks and systems plans, delivering business applications to users.
No longer are cloud services just for testing or temporary projects, but are instead helping IT departments serve their internal and external customers faster, at greater scale and in a lot of cases, more cost effectively.
As cloud services make their way into the heart of IT departments, the need for IT teams to adapt existing infrastructure has grown. They must integrate and manage their current datacentre networks alongside the newer cloud services.
This has become a great opportunity for channel partners; the channel has long provided IT departments with short-term and long-term expertise and staff augmentation, product and service procurement as well as vendor contract management.
Organisations will once again need to lean on expert third parties to assist in the design and delivery of a vendor-agnostic or multi-vendor approach. The inherent issue with the cloud flags up the opportunity: you have to build for resilience and specificity.
The cloud offers building blocks to achieve business-specific objectives. Whether building for scale, resilience or an ever-increasing global reach, it is in providing the intelligence required in design and implementation of these complex and often multi-vendor offerings that the channel can once again add value.
The era of collaboration and internet performance is upon us and the channel plays an influential role. The time is now for the channel to make a big comeback.
In order to capitalise on the many opportunities presented by the cloud, the channel needs to step up and consciously "own" its relationships with service providers. Here they can further promote themselves as either specialists or global platforms for delivery to both the end user and the vendor market.
Paul Heywood is EMEA director at Dyn