Boston, Mass. –Channel partners should shift focus to delivering services and facilitating cloud computing among small businesses if they want to remain profitable over the next four years, according to a vendors and analysts.
The panel discussion followed the announcement of Synnex’s (NYSE: SNX) first cloud offering to the channel, CloudSolve UC, by president Kevin Murai at Synnex Corp.’s Varnex conference in Boston. “The cloud is coming, the cloud is actually here, the cloud has been here for awhile,” he said.
Synnex wants to help channel partners deliver converged cloud solutions, Murai said. Services with target both the public cloud (services running on the Internet) and the private cloud (services running on an Intranet behind a firewall).
Don’t fret over losing margins on sales of hardware and software, or who “owns” the customer, vendors agreed on a panel at the Boston gathering for Synnex’s community-building Varnex program. Just get ready to invest in the cloud as small businesses, say with less than 100 employees, inevitably transition to a computing model that sees applications, infrastructure, and solutions delivered as a service over the Internet and priced on a per-use basis.
Vendors from recognized industry tech brands agreed that 2011 will see growth in IT spending, and that SMBs specifically will be looking to invest. Most also highlighted a portfolio of cloud services as the way they’d be meeting that growth, and asked channel partners to get on board.
“SMB is probably the fastest growing market segment for HP right now,” said Terrence Richardson, director of strategy & alliances for Hewlett-Packard Co.. HP sees cloud opportunities in providing data backup options for SMBs, he adds. But he doesn’t see that as affecting the premise of how HP works with its partners.
Providing services for Microsoft Corp. software is “one of the key profitability levers for partners,” said Greg Linsy, director of SMB and channel for Microsoft. Microsoft has launched its Small Business Server 2011 as both an on-premises and cloud-based product, and is expected to launch its cloud-based Office 365 in the next couple of months.
CloudSolv UC, branded as a unified communications offering, includes full voice services that include voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and desktop services using a platform developed by Microsoft Corp. and Broadsoft Inc. The service will make use of Microsoft Lync servers and Broadsoft’s soft PBX.
“Sometimes you do need a partner that has the resources and time to select the best few categories to take to market,” Murai told partners. Synnex is ready to run any partner’s entire cloud platform.
Ignore the cloud at your own peril, warns Tiffani Bova, research vice president at analyst firm Gartner Inc. And if you don’t invest in the cloud?
“Get really good at what you do now, because there will be less need for you in the future,” she says.
Adoption of cloud services among SMBs will be held back while channel partners quibble over how to make money on selling the new computing model, she says, and worry about who owns the customer – the reseller or the vendor. “I’ll answer that, the customer owns the customer,” Bova says.
By 2015, channel partners will be playing a new role as “cloud brokers” that make money off transactional margins, not margins on hardware or software sales, she says. Instead of cashing in on licencing, partners can charge for services. Partners should also be ready to build private clouds so they continue to have a role in the supply chain. Otherwise, it’s just a direct relationship between customer and vendor.
“There’s no need for the middleman, which scares everyone in this room,” Bova says.
HP’s Richardson echoed Bova’s endorsement of the private cloud as a good bet for channel partners to place. It projects that the hardware-as-a-service layer will be worth $143 billion by 2013.
CloudSolv has been sold through a few U.S.-based partners so far as part of a soft launch, Murai says. No Canadian partners have been involved in the program yet.