Lessons from the NGC15

At the NextGen Cloud Expo yesterday, Tony Hawk was the featured keynote. Not exactly a prized speaker, he did have interesting vignettes about his life. He kept doing the skate-boarding thing even when he was broke and making no money at it. It was his passion – and he eventually made the big payday.

Another lesson from Hawk is that in personal branding own your brand and what others can do with it. It can ruin you otherwise.

David McCann, VP of AWS Marketplace, gave a talk that started out pretty informational. I mean, the first 5 slides were great, then straight into the pitch: “Open a browser, let’s sign you all up as AWS Partners right now!” Why do people think that I want to spend my money, travel and time for something like that? Really? Would David sit through 20 minutes of me explaining how to be my partner? Unlikely.

The 5 slides amounted to reasons business go to cloud” (1) increased agility; (2) lower cost or CAPEX; (3) Elasticity; (4) Breadth of functionality; (5) Go Global in minutes.

The reason that VARs and MSPs should recognize this is to determine where they want to bring their skill set to bear. Removing the heavy lifting is just one place that businesses need help. Guiding them to the right cloud platform – AWS, Rackspace, Azure, Private, Hybrid, Public, nextgen. A migration stratgey and project management.

In a point, click and deploy world, where do channel partners fit?

Other news: Netwolves was acquired – back in June! – by a healthcare IT company called Vasomedical. In that release, I see that Netwolves was doing about $30M! Didn’t know that. I wonder how that will shake out for the channel program!

WOW! Business did a deal with WOW! Business. (No press release available.) Yet you can see them holding hands throughout this event. Hope that relationship works out for both. VAR Dynamics is a white label for Microsoft, Zimbra and Intronis.

On a TCA panel to help bridge the gap for VARs and MSPs to grasp telecom, COLOTRAQ CEO, Dany Bouchedid, mentioned that his master agency is having a banner year due to Hybrid Cloud Projects. These projects combine traditional elements of colocation with IAAS for their own private cloud. Not everyone is ready to go on the big public cloud ecosystems like Azure or AWS. “We are certainly not seeing thatlevel of adoption from large enterprises,” says Bouchedid.

In other news, VoIP Supply opened a marketplace for SIP Trunk providers and Hosted VoIP Providers. So in essence, VoIP Supply has shifted to becoming cloud services broker. That should make a few partners really happy to hear.

Tags: amazon, channel partners, collocation, data center, iaas, mergers, msp, var, white-label
Related tags: cloud, business, partners