While the direct marketing approach works for some especially simple and elegant cloud solutions—Dropbox comes to mind—vendors are realizing that the everyday SMB owner leans heavily on his or her "IT guy." Unless their IT consultant, VAR, or MSP recommends it, a huge swathe of SMBs decision makers will be slow to adopt complex cloud solutions. At the same time, SMB owners are interested in the cloud, but surveys have shown that over half of them would prefer to purchase all of their cloud services from a single source (i.e. their IT guy).
With that in mind, here's a rundown of some of the most channel-friendly cloud vendors. All of them offer robust channel programs that include some combination of generous revenue sharing, white label options, comprehensive training, and marketing assistance.
FiberCloud offers a variety of white label cloud services to channel partners, including Hosted Exchange, Hosted SharePoint, cloud servers, server and workstation backup, and secure file transfer and sharing. FiberCloud also boasts top-notch, US-based customer service that's willing to collaborate with channel partners to develop custom cloud solutions for end-users. FiberCloud relies heavily on its channel partner program to market and sell its cloud services.
The Virtual Computing Environment Company (VCE) is a rarely discussed collaboration of VMware, Cisco, and EMC. VCE offers a program for channel partners to resell the company's private cloud solutions and provides its partners with high-quality training and marketing dollars as a reward for meeting various sales benchmarks. VCE is one of the few companies that empowers channel partners to offer enterprise-grade private cloud solutions in a matter of weeks.
CA Technologies' new Global Partner Program includes a variety of cloud services. Partners benefit from a simple, easy-to-use portal with both phone and chat support, as well as cloud architecture specialists ready to help channel partners integrate multiple cloud services or design private cloud solutions. CA has a long history of supporting the SMB technology channel and has recently announced its intention to focus more attention on the SMB channel.
Rackspace is one of the first pure cloud companies to recognize the importance of the SMB channel. Rackspace's partner programs allow channel partners to resell virtually any service Rackspace offers (and there are a lot of them). Some of their products have white label versions available, too, such as Jungle Disk—which is a phenomenal low-cost workstation and server backup tool with a fairly powerful set of file sync and productivity features.
Chinook Communications is another cloud vendor that offers a wide variety of cloud-hosted, white label solutions. Products include Hosted Lync (including voice), Hosted Exchange, Hosted SharePoint, SaaS application delivery (for virtually any Windows application), and Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Partnering with Chinook allows IT shops to literally become telecom providers. Imagine being able to meet all of a business's phone and communication needs at half the price of AT&T, Time Warner, or the like. Chinook's president has spent about a dozen years as an IT professional working in and around the SMB channel.
Google Apps offers a reseller program that's a perfect fit for most channel partners who serve small businesses. In addition to providing traditional Exchange/Outlook functions, Google Apps can serve as a comprehensive productivity platform. Between Google Docs and the thousands of third party services available through the Marketplace, there's little Google Apps can't do. And the best part? The reseller owns the customer. Google hopes to accelerate their channel partner programs in 2012 according their SMB channel lead.
Office 365 competes head-to-head with Google Apps, but it's more likely to appeal to traditional customers who are leery of relying entirely on the cloud. Microsoft's partner program offers generous, lifelong residuals and a familiar reseller portal. Office 365's online Outlook implementation is certainly much easier to manage than an Active Directory deployment littered with unmaintained PST files. Existing Office 365 resellers will likely receive early access to Microsoft's more comprehensive cloud partner program due out later this year.
Honorable Mentions:
- Intermedia (Exchange, SharePoint, PBX, Backup)
- ThinkGrid (Backup, Cloud Servers, SaaS Application Delivery, Exchange, SharePoint)
- GoGrid (Core Infrastructure-as-a-Service)
For SMB IT pros who remain wary of cloud computing, now's the time to shed any inhibitions and hit the cloud running. Increasingly, businesses are turning to the cloud for convenient, reliable, simple-to-use infrastructure and software services. A portion of businesses users will always remain resistant to cloud computing solutions, but any IT support company that ignores the cloud will miss out on a huge market.
One of the biggest advantages of reselling and integrating cloud services today is long-term customer lock-in. Businesses that are just now migrating to Rackspace, Google Apps, Office 365, Hosted Lync, and the like will probably stay with their new service providers for at least several years. That means early movers can land large contracts that carry generous lifetime residuals. That kind of opportunity won't stay around forever as the field of service providers grows and the pool of potential customers shrinks.
This guest blog post was originally posted by SMB Nation.
