The channel and the cloud

The relentless increase in the use of cloud-based services is both an opportunity and a challenge for resellers of IT products and services. The opportunity is to help their customers adapt to the new landscape and identify when a cloud-based service is the best option for the delivery of a particular requirement. The challenge is to build out a portfolio of cloud-based offerings, from reseller friendly suppliers, to sit alongside traditional on-premise products so that they can offer their customers a choice.
 
The problem with this is that identifying such services and doing due diligence on suppliers takes time. Even harder is to integrate services together to provide a federated look and feel. Here distributors are starting to take a lead. Quocirca recently spoke at the launch of COMPUTERLINKS’s Alvea platform; the presentation can be viewed here.
 
Alvea is a range of cloud-based security services including on-demand servers and storage, data backup, security and collaboration services. Unified billing and management are built into the offerings and resellers can white-label the whole thing to appear as their own. Being a well-established distributor COMPUTERLINKS has chosen to work with channel friendly suppliers plugging gaps with its own offerings as appropriate.
 
Ingram Micro has also assembled a set of cloud services it has branded “Seismic”, perhaps an indication the earth really is shifting under the channel or at least the clouds above it! Certain other distributors, for example Avnet, look set to follow the lead of COMPUTERLINKS and Ingram Micro and build out cloud service portfolios of their own.
 
Cloud-based services will continue to grow as a proportion of overall IT spending for the foreseeable future and both resellers and distributors that fail to recognise this and extend their portfolios accordingly will be failing their customers and themselves.
 
Bob Tarzey, Analyst and Director, Quocirca