Category Archives: Channel

Azure, Channel, Managed services, Microsoft, News & Analysis, Rackspace, Scott Guthrie, Taylor Rhodes

Rackspace to offer support for, resell Microsoft Azure

Rackspace is set to offer support for Azure customers and resell Microsoft's public and private cloud technology

Rackspace is set to offer support for Azure customers and resell Microsoft’s public and private cloud technology

In another move aimed at shifting its business towards managed (cloud) services Rackspace this week announced it will extend its ‘fanatical support’ services to Microsoft Azure public and private cloud infrastructure.

Rackspace said customers will be able to buy either bundled Azure infrastructure with support, or just support services. The offerings will be available first in the US, with plans for an international rollout “through early 2016.”

“Our strategy at Rackspace has always been to provide the world’s best expertise and service for industry-leading technologies — including a broad selection of Microsoft products,” said Taylor Rhodes, chief executive at Rackspace.

“We’re pleased to expand our relationship with Microsoft and the options we provide for our customers by offering Fanatical Support for Azure. By adding support for Azure to our portfolio, we can now serve customers who want public, private and hybrid cloud environments built on the Microsoft Azure Stack,” Rhodes said.

Rackspace already offers a range of Microsoft-based managed services and support but the latest move will see the company double down on the service component for the newly re-architected Azure Stack, including Microsoft’s own public cloud.

The move is also yet another step in Rackspace’s broader transformation from a pure-play hosting and cloud provider towards a managed services and managed cloud company.

Scott Guthrie, executive vice president of Microsoft’s Cloud and Enterprise group said: “Fanatical Support for Azure and Azure Stack adds Rackspace’s industry-leading support to Microsoft’s deep experience with the hybrid cloud, creating a win-win for customers. With this relationship, our mutual customers will have even more options for migrating their diverse IT workloads to the cloud.”

Channel, Linux, Mark Enzweiler, Michael Ferris, News & Analysis, Red Hat

Red Hat beefs up cloud partner programme as ecosystem broadens

Red Hat is broadening its cloud partner programme

Red Hat is broadening its cloud partner programme

Red Hat is replacing its existing cloud provider programme with a revamped one it claims will help provide better support for distributors, managed service providers and systems integrators. The company said the move was in response to what it sees as a broadening ecosystem of partnerships in cloud.

The “Certified Cloud and Service Provider” programme will replace the existing “Certified Cloud Provider” initiative and broaden the types of members included. The company will  certify and provide technical support to vendors as well as service providers offering Red Hat-based cloud services for any type of cloud deployment.

The company said the move was driven in part by the continued adoption of newer technologies and platforms like PaaS and Linux containers, and the broadening of the ecosystem of potential partners.

“Much like enterprise IT itself, the world of cloud computing is constantly evolving, especially with the growing promise of hybrid cloud approaches and Linux container-based architectures,” said Michael Ferris, senior director, Business Architecture, Red Hat.

“The Red Hat Certified Cloud and Service Provider program is designed to encompass nearly all service provider models, spanning the public cloud to on-site managed services, offering our customers a secure, stable and trusted partner ecosystem upon which to build their next-generation IT projects using Red Hat solutions.”

Red Hat said the revamped programme will launch with about 13 of the 15 service providers recognised in Gartner’s oft-cited Magic Quadrant, and has grown close to 60 per cent from the previous year. The company has close to 50 cloud providers signed up to the programme so far.

Mark Enzweiler, senior vice president, Global Partners and Alliances, Red Hat said: “The Certified Cloud and Service Provider program is an important next step for one of Red Hat’s key channels. Our partners want to develop their businesses based on enterprise-ready open source technologies, and this global program delivers new opportunities for recurring revenue to a diverse set of participating partners to expand their business with Red Hat.”

Channel, Cisco, InterCloud, Internet of Things, News & Analysis, Telco Cloud

Cisco beefs up Intercloud strategy

Cisco is bolstering its Intercloud programme by partnering with ISVs

Cisco is bolstering its Intercloud programme by partnering with ISVs

Cisco is bolstering its Intercloud strategy this week, announcing partnerships with 35 ISVs which the company said would help create and offer a wider range of cloud services based on Cisco infrastructure.

The company announced the impending launch of an Intercloud Marketplace that will be populated with apps certified to run on Intercloud infrastructure, due to go live in autumn this year.

Cisco said it is partnering with a range of commercial app and development companies including Apprenda, Active State and Docker to make their cloud developer environments work on the Intercloud platform.

The company is also partnering with big data solution providers including MapR, Hortonworks, Cloudera and the Apache Hadoop Community to offer hybrid cloud big data implementation support. Additionally, it said it would expose APIs to enable software-based control of networking and security, a move it claims will help developers create Internet of Things services more effectively.

Cisco’s Intercloud strategy has been somewhat of a slow burner, even by Cisco’s own estimates. The company has about 100 Intercloud customers and 65 partners globally, though last month Cisco chairman and chief executive John Chambers said the programme would pick up pace as it moved into “phase 2” of the Intercloud strategy, which is what the Marketplace is all about.

“The pieces that we were missing was how do you go into this new environment where each of these “public clouds in clouds” are separate? And you have to be on different vendors or different companies’ tech to have the ability to go into it. So what we’re looking at first is an architecture and it cements our relationships in service providers. And then it really comes through to how you monetise it over time,” he said at the time.

“This will just take time to monetize, but the effect we see indirectly is already huge when you talk about a Deutsche Telekom or a Telstra and our relationships with those.”

Channel, Cube52, Matthew Munson, Opinion, The channel

The channel must embrace cloud to build for the future

The channel needs to embrace cloud services in order to succeed in IT today

The channel needs to embrace cloud services in order to succeed in IT today

With cloud acceptance growing, more and more businesses are dipping their toes in the water and trying out cloud based services and applications in a bid to work smarter and lower IT expenditure. But with recent research suggesting that four in ten ICT decision-makers feel their deployment fails to live up to the hype – more needs to be done to ensure cloud migration is a success.

This is where the channel has a vital role to play and can bridge the knowledge gap and help end-users reap the benefits that cloud technology can provide.

With the cloud becoming a mainstream solution for businesses and an integral part of an organisation’s IT strategy, the channel is presented with a huge opportunity. Offering cloud services to the market has the potential to yield high revenues, so it’s vital that the channel takes a realistic approach to adopting cloud within its portfolio, and becomes a trusted advisor to the end user.

We have identified three key reasons why resellers shy away from broadening their offering to encompass cloud for new and existing customers. A common barrier is a simple lack of understanding of the cloud and its benefits. However, if a business is keen to adopt this technology, it is vital that its reseller is able to offer advice and guidance to prevent them looking elsewhere.

Research by Opal back in 2010 found that 40 per cent of resellers admit a sense of ‘fear and confusion’ around cloud computing, with the apprehension to embrace the technology also extending to end users, with 57 per cent reporting uncertainty among their customer bases. This lack of education means they are missing out on huge opportunities for their business. A collaborative approach between the reseller and cloud vendor will help to ensure a seamless knowledge transfer followed by successful partnership and delivery.

The sheer upheaval caused by offering the cloud will see some resellers needing to re-evaluate their own business models and strategies to fulfil the need. Those that are unaccustomed to a service-oriented business model may find that becoming a cloud reseller presents strategic challenges as they rely on out-dated business plans and models that don’t enable this new technology. However, failing to evolve business models could leave resellers behind in the adoption curve, whilst their competitors are getting ahead. Working with an already established partner will help resellers re-evaluate their existing business plans to ensure they can offer cloud solutions to their customers.

Resellers are finding it challenging to provide their customers with quick, scalable cloud solutions due to the fact that moving existing technology services into cloud services can be time consuming, and staff will be focused on working to integrate these within the enterprise. However, this issue can easily be resolved by choosing a trusted cloud provider, and in turn building a successful partnership.

Although resellers will come across barriers when looking at providing their customers with cloud services, these shouldn’t get in the way of progression. In order to enter a successful partnership with a cloud provider, there are some important factors resellers should consider before taking the plunge.

Scalability

Before choosing a prospective partner, resellers need to ensure it has the scalability and technology innovation to provide a simple integration of current IT services into the cloud. Recent research has proved that deploying cloud services from three or more suppliers can damage a company’s business agility. UK businesses state a preference for procuring cloud services from a single supplier for ease of management. It’s important to make sure the chosen provider has the ability to provide one fully encompassed cloud service that can offer everything their customers require.

Brand reputation

Choosing a partner that offers not only a best-of breed private, public and hybrid cloud solution, but also has the ability to provide the reseller with a branded platform will give an extra layer of credibility to the business for not only existing customers, but future ones as well. Resellers are more likely to choose a cloud provider that gives them control over the appearance, as well as support and access to infrastructure of the cloud platform.

Industry experience

It’s vital to ensure the cloud provider has extensive industry experience and knowledge with a proven track record in order to meet the required criteria of scalability and performance. The partner must have the knowledge in order to educate and offer advice to the reseller. If they are able to do so, the reseller can therefore pass this knowledge on to their own customers.

By not offering the cloud, resellers will miss out on vast opportunities and in turn, lose potential revenue as well as new and existing customers. The channel must now embrace the cloud and take advantage of the partnerships available in order to succeed.

Written by Matthew Munson, chief technology officer, Cube52

Channel, Datacentre, IDC, Intelligence, Kuba Stolarski, News & Analysis, Private Cloud, Public Cloud

IDC: Cloud to make up nearly half of IT infrastructure spending by 2019

Enterprise adoption of public cloud services seems to be outstripping private cloud demand

Enterprise adoption of public cloud services seems to be outstripping private cloud demand

Total cloud infrastructure spending will grow by 21 per cent year over year to $32bn this year, accounting for approximately 33 per cent of all IT infrastructure spending, up from about 28 per cent in 2014, according to IDC.

The research and analyst house echoed claims that cloud computing has been significantly disrupting the IT infrastructure market over the past couple of years. The firm estimates last year cloud infrastructure spending totalled $26.4bn, up 18.7 per cent from the year before.

Kuba Stolarski, research manager, server, virtualization and workload research at IDC said much of the growth over the next few years will be driven largely by public cloud adoption.

Private cloud infrastructure spending will grow by 16 per cent year on year to $12bn, while public cloud IT infrastructure spending will grow by a whopping 25 per cent in 2015 to $21bn – nearly twice as much, the firm believes.

“The pace of adoption of cloud-based platforms will not abate for quite some time, resulting in cloud IT infrastructure expansion continuing to outpace the growth of the overall IT infrastructure market for the foreseeable future,” Stolarski explained.

“As the market evolves into deploying 3rd Platform solutions and developing next-gen software, organizations of all types and sizes will discover that traditional approaches to IT management will increasingly fall short of the simplicity, flexibility, and extensibility requirements that form the core of cloud solutions.”

By 2019, the firm believe, cloud infrastructure spending will top $52bn and represent 45 per cent of the total IT infrastructure spend; public cloud will represent about $32bn of that amount, and private cloud the remaining $20bn.

According to IDC, 15 per cent of the overall infrastructure spend in EMEA was related to cloud environments in 2014, up from 8 per cent in 2011. $3.4bn was spent on hardware going to cloud environments in EMEA in 2013, up 21 per cent from 2012.

AWS, Channel, Europe, IBM, Ingram Micro, News & Analysis, VAR

Ingram Micro expands cloud marketplace to EU

Traditional IT resellers are trying to rebuild the business model to fit cloud services

Traditional IT resellers are trying to rebuild the business model to fit cloud services

IT tech distributor Ingram Micro has launched a marketplace for cloud services in Europe in a bid to bolster its appeal to channel partners, many of which are increasingly offering their products as-a-service. The move is aimed at making its proposition in the cloud economy more compelling, particularly as other traditional IT vendors and cloud incumbents move in on reseller turf.

The Cloud Marketplace, which handles billing and service deployment for a range of services offered by cloud vendors, is already up and running in the US. But the most recent announcement will see the platform launch imminently in France, the Netherlands, and the UK.

The company said it plans to launch the marketplace in Belgium, Italy, Germany, Spain, and Sweden in the second quarter of 2015.

In prepared remarks the company said it wanted to enable channel partners to more effectively sell their cloud wares to clients, and in particular, exploit what Ingram sees as a growing opportunity in the SME market for resellers. With the Cloud Marketplace, channel partners can manage the complete end-customer subscription lifecycle from a single, automated platform, provided and supported by Ingram Micro, the company said.

“For our channel partners, enabling businesses to operate in a hybrid environment that includes cloud-based solutions is as much about business transformation as it is about technology,” said Carl Alloin, executive director Europe, Ingram Micro Cloud. “Our Cloud Marketplace was designed to help channel partners quickly scale as they seek to expand their footprint and profitability in the cloud.”

Ingram is among a growing number of resellers refitting their channel models for the cloud (Arrow is another big one in Europe that recently launched a cloud app marketplace), in part because other traditional vendors and cloud service providers are starting to threaten their role in the market. Vendors like IBM, which launched its cloud service marketplace last year, are much more willing to cooperate with other vendors they would otherwise compete with at different levels of the stack, while cloud incumbents like AWS are attracting a range of other software and service providers to its fast-growing ecosystem.