Magirus challenges partners on their cloud plans

VAD Magirus has warned its channel partners that they must start thinking immediately about how they are going to deliver cloud services in the future, or risk missing the boat entirely.
Magirus UK MD Denise Bryant told partners at its recent channel event that customers will become increasingly used to their applications being delivered by public cloud providers, and IT firms need to capitalise on this as soon as possible.
“In three to five years’ time, when the CEO decides what services he wants in the cloud, he will go straight to his reseller – he  likes him, he trusts him – who better to go to ? But [resellers] need to start now, changing their branding from a virtual storage provider to a cloud consultancy, and do it now!”
Consultancy services
Bryant says resellers can begin to provide chargeable consultancy services, for example, specifying which services can go out to the public cloud, and which ones to keep in the private cloud. “There’s a load of business processes and IT consultancy because IT mangers won’t know where to start,” she says. “You must position yourself as a trusted cloud computing provider. Your average IT manager’s not going to buy cloud. It’s the CEOs and CIOs.”
Bryant believes that “the future for the cloud is a hybrid cloud in the medium term. End users will pick and choose services; some will have to be kept internally, for security or compliance issues, and some less important services like CRM will be provided by the public cloud. We believe end users will pick best of breed services, what’s right for their business.”
Possible models
Bryant identified three possible models that resellers can adopt as a cloud specialist: they can help their customers work out which services to put into public cloud, and recommend public providers.
Or they can advise and resell public cloud services themselves as part of their portfolio: “in which case they must look at funding their business through an ongoing revenue stream, and look at that now,” she cautions.
“Or some will want to build their own cloud services – they will resell their own cloud depending on [their] ability to invest in it,” she says. “A cloud provider offering everything from private to public cloud platform and applications can look after [their customers] 100 percent – that’s a massive lock in for end users.”
Distributor role
On where distributors like Magirus fit into the new cloud business model, Bryant says “for next five years there is a massive business in helping end users implement internal private clouds.”

She says distributors can also help offer cloud services to partners for resale, and may help broker deals with big telcos and companies like Rackspace, and Salesforce.com.