THINK IT Services

The topic of building effective channel alliances in the Cloud continues to gain greater attention. This past week, I spoke at two events and attended a third in the Boston area in which Cloud channel strategies and solutions were a central theme.

The first event was a local gathering called, “Mondays in the Cloud”, organized by Sonian and hosted at the UMass-Boston Venture Development Center. The session was kicked off by Greg Arnette, Sonian’s Founder and CTO, who provided his perspective on the state of the Cloud marketplace. I followed Greg with a talk about the Cloud industry trends driving the demand for a stronger channel network to build on the initial success of Cloud services. My talk was followed by Erik Sebesta of cloudTP who talked about how Cloud integration services companies like his are becoming an important channel to market for Cloud vendors seeking to sell private Cloud solutions into enterprises. Brian Matsubara of Amazon Web Services (AWS) concluded the event with a description of AWS’s channel strategies, programs and success stories.

The next day, I presented and moderated a panel about the state of the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Cloud marketplace, and how established independent software vendors (ISVs) can capitalize on these trends at Progress Software’s “Revolution” customer and partner conference. The overall event attracted over 1,000 attendees, an illustration of Progress Software’s worldwide user and partner base. My breakout session, “Winning the Revolution at the Next Frontier—In the Cloud”, was followed by a panel discussion which I facilitated consisting of Grant Christensen, General Manager-Operations at Supercorp Technology Pty Ltd. based in Australia; Sten Petersson, CEO of Exicom based in Scandinavia; and Tim Diassi, Executive Vice President and General Manager, UnicornHR based in New Jersey. The companies not only operated in different continents, but also delivered very different solutions. Supercorp Technology supplies data services to insurance and financial service companies. Exicom offers an enterprise project management solution. And, UnicornHR provides SaaS-based payroll services. All three companies are experencing growing demand for their Cloud-based solutions and benefiting from their channel relationships with Progress Software.

Yesterday, I attended the ASCII Group’s Success Summit in the Boston area. While it wasn’t promoted as a Cloud event, nearly every speaker addressed the opportunities and challenges associated with the Cloud from a channel perspective. The event attracted over 100 local IT service companies and value-added resellers (VARs), as well as a couple dozen sponsors. It was an impressive gathering with a number of good speakers offering practical advice for channel companies moving to the Cloud.

All the talk about Cloud channel strategies and success stories reinforced the timeliness of the Cloud Channel Summit. You can hear more of my views regarding the forces bringing Cloud channels into focus in the podcast I recorded with Brett Martin and Mike Vizard of Channel Tech Network in Episode 52 of their Channel Happy Hour series.

Dell’s announcement today of a new EqualLogic PS6000 series of storage arrays might appear to be a straightforward attempt to elevate the company’s stature in enterprise data centers. But, I think the company has an opportunity to aim higher than that.

Dell has always been about providing better computers at a lower price by finding economies at every stage of the development and delivery supply-chain. Some call this commoditizing markets. Others see it disintermediating the channel. Anyway you look at it, from its inception, Dell has been in the business of redefining and disrupting the way the computer industry operates.

Dell helped to bring PCs and laptops to the masses via direct online sales. It made it easy for companies to acquire servers in the same fashion. Now, Dell is setting its sites on transforming the way companies operate their data centers by leveraging its EqualLogic capabilities to raise the bar regarding the performance and flexibility of today’s server technology, as well as simplifying and automating the deployment process.

Dell’s foray into the data center will be a welcome relief to some CIOs and other corporate executives who have been pleased with Dell’s products and services at the departmental and end-user level, and frustrated with the complexities and costs of traditional hardware in their data centers.

But, I would be disappointed if Dell stopped there because I think there are a growing number of enterprise CIOs and corporate executives who would be very interested in offloading, or ‘out-tasking’, portions of their internal data center requirements to a Dell-powered ‘cloud computing’ service.

By offering a cloud computing service, Dell not only creates a new revenue stream but also provides a showplace where corporate customers can see Dell’s computing power at work.

Dell has already made it clear that it wants to redefine the IT services market by building service functionality into its computers and automating many other aspects of traditional support and consulting services. Dell has also made a series of acquisitions to achieve this vision, including EqualLogic, Everdream and SilverBack Technologies.

Just as the overall cloud computing industry has evolved from the success of the SaaS movement, Dell has an opportunity to extend its technology capabilities and brand equity into the clouds by leveraging its new functionality and corporate history as a business innovator to respond to customers’ growing receptivity to cloud computing services.