Channels Ascend From Disintermediation to Cloud Industry Darlings

I’ve longed believed that traditional channel companies in the tech industry could play a pivotal role in the rapidly evolving Cloud marketplace,  despite various predictions that they were destined to be ‘disintermediated’ by the emergence of low-cost, ‘on-demand’ services.

Rather than discard channel companies as a relic of the past, nearly every major Cloud vendor – both net-native and reincarnated hardware/software vendors – is now courting channel companies to gain a competitive advantage in the market.

Given the lingering confusion and uncertainty about the IT and business implications of Cloud solutions among key corporate decision-makers, it isn’t surprising that leading Cloud vendors are seeking to enlist established channel companies to help them with their marketing, sales and support efforts.

The established channel companies have earned the trust of their customers over the years by helping them separate the hype from the reality of previous generations of new technologies. They’ve also helped their customers cater generic systems and business applications into industry-specific solutions to meet their specific business needs.

Today’s Cloud vendors need similar help packaging their basic Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) capabilities into specialized solutions to extend their reach into new geographic or vertical markets.

Established and emerging channel companies can draw upon a rapidly expanding array of SaaS, PaaS and IaaS ‘raw materials’ to create value-added solutions to meet specific customer requirements.

In fact, many IT and business decision-makers could simply use help sorting through the proliferation of Cloud offerings flooding the market. A barometer of this ‘Cloud Rush’ effect is THINKstrategies’ Cloud Computing Showplace which now lists over 1800 vendors offering SaaS, PaaS and IaaS solutions across over 90 application, industry, technology and service categories.

Gartner refers to distributors, systems integrators (SIs) and value-added resellers (VARs) pulling these Cloud piece-parts together for their customers as ‘cloud brokers’. These Many of these Cloud-based channel companies are adding value by providing a lifecycle of planning, design, implementation and management services aimed at helping their customers select, adopt and fully utilize a unified portfolio of ‘on-demand’ services.

THINKstrategies is hosting a conference focused on the role of the channel in the Cloud, called the Cloud Channel Summit, on Monday, November 7, at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA. One measure of the timeliness of the event is the stature of the sponsors, ranging from Salesforce.com and Dell-Boomi to IBM and Informatica, and the positions of our speakers, including Stephen Cho, the Director of the Google Enterprise Channel Program, who is kicking off the Summit.

We also chose this venue because of the symbolism of its name, as well as its central location in Silicon Valley. We firmly believe that the Cloud movement is at a historic crossroads in its rapid evolution. While it has experienced tremendous growth selling to the first wave of Cloud adopters directly, in order for Cloud vendors to sustain this growth and gain even greater inroads into organizations of all sizes worldwide, they must establish more partnerships with a wider array of established and emerging partners.

I hope you can join us at the Cloud Channel Summit where we’ll discuss industry best practices for building successful channel relationships in the Cloud.

Kaplan is the Managing Director of THINKstrategies (www.thinkstrategies.com) and Founder of the Cloud Computing Showplace (www.cloudshowplace.com). He can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .