Having the 3rd Cloud Partners Conference in Boston is symbolic and fun, for a few reasons… 

For starters, what a great place to spend a few days in September! You know, instead of February. If you’re a first timer or haven’t spent meaningful time in Boston, carve out a few hours to cover the Charles River, see Harvard/MIT/BU, the new Seaport, and the old Faneuil Hall – enjoy ‘the town’ during a great time of year.

Boston is a technology city…hundreds of tech companies are born here, and its network of colleges and universities creates a robust funnel of talent to local businesses.  Given there are more than 100 colleges and universities in the Boston area, it’s a nice parallel for what cloud in the channel partner community is all about…still…education.

Depending on whose keynote you’re listening to, between 80 and 90% of enterprise workloads STILL reside in client data centers.  I’ve seen enough clients come through our platforms to know that for the overwhelming majority, the move to the cloud was a major accelerant to either driving hard costs out of the business or meeting speed and scale requirements otherwise unattainable. In many cases, it did both.

That said – the continually shifting challenge in the cloud sales market is no longer ‘will the cloud make me (insert advantage here)’, but more along the lines of ‘why now and how??’   This creates the fastball down the middle for the channel partners with a big bat…and brings me to this:

3 things that every channel partner should be thinking about when it comes to cloud:

1. Be prepared to go beyond the platforms themselves and into migration planning and onboarding strategies all the way to steady-state management of the new environment on the cloud.  Build practices specifically to address this or components of this.
2. Value is rising – from the cloud itself, to the value-add on top of cloud;  management of applications, BCDR strategy and implementation leveraging cloud models, etc.  The reason the value is rising brings me to my next point.
3. Cloud platforms themselves are quickly commoditizing.  Successfully running self-service, hypervisor-based compute/memory/storage platforms are the given. VMware has 4,000 cloud providers in their vCloud Air network.  While the benefits of these platforms vs. legacy models are not questioned, they often can’t be realized without utilizing other value-added services beyond the uptime of the platform.

Thankfully for the legion of cloud-selling channel partners, most of the cloud providers and services firms are focused on one or a few of the ingredients of success – but not the entirety of what clients will need to transact their journey from legacy data center to cloud-based delivery models.  At Navisite, we are listening… we’ve recently added migration services to the cloud and management services across Microsoft Office 365.  However, we know that it’ll still take the scholars of the channel to navigate through the confusion, to add their value, and to bring clients through the analysis to their eventual ‘cloud outcome’.

Enjoy the show this year.  Good luck translating that crazy Boston accent. And come see the Navisite team at booth 413!

Also, here’s more information on Navisite Partners.

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