What cloud means for VARs

Last week, Hunter Richards at Software Advice blogged about how VARs should navigate the cloud computing market and related virtualization trends.

Based on his recommendations, in order for VARs to maintain their business and competitive positioning, they should do the following:

• Specialize
• Develop competency on a leading PaaS
• Make the cloud’s efficiency work for you and utilize cloud applications
• Offer tech-enabled services
• Promote the cloud to your existing customer base

All good advice. I will add the following advice for VARs looking to stay in the game and on top of the latest technology trends:

• Achieve thought leadership around optimally integrating various cloud computing applications, vendors, and on-premise systems for specific use cases. While Hunter believes that the amount of integration required will decrease over time, I think it’ll be a while before this materializes. In the short term, a lot of businesses are shifting only a portion of their applications and data to discreet cloud computing vendors while keeping the rest onsite. This means “hybrid clouds”, signaling a lot of integration between different cloud computing vendors and on-premise systems. I blogged about this before here. Dell acquired Boomi to capitalize on this opportunity, and IBM acquired Cast Iron.
• Become experts in addressing their customer’s security and compliance concerns (including identity and access management) as they shift data to the cloud. Security and compliance continue to be significant challenges for businesses, and the more VARs who can get out in front of this issue, the more they’ll be able to help their customers ride the cloud efficiency and cost-saving wave, and enjoy loyal, paying customers. What’s true for expansion stage software companies in this space is also true for VARs. Pain is opportunity! 
• Become go-to advisers for cloud computing vendors and their needs. This speaks for itself. 

And to expand on Hunter’s advice a bit for these three points:

• Develop competency on a leading PaaS
• Make the cloud’s efficiency work for you and utilize cloud applications
• Offer tech-enabled services

Find ways to leverage cloud computing vendors to collaborate with your customers, on both on-premise deployments and those in the cloud. PaaS is a great example, though I’d be careful when focusing on the PaaS vendors that make the most sense for my client base (for example, are they likely to leverage Ruby or Java?).

Another is SkyTap, a recent OpenView venture capital investment. In addition to using SkyTap for QA IT infrastructure, large enterprises used it to host on-premise IT projects for testing and collaboration with 3rd party vendors, including their VARs.