One of the many effects that the Cloud will bring is the elevation of the importance of channel businesses. Many of these companies are likely to become more well-known than their traditional `big-name’ technology providers, not least because the Cloud , being focused upon service delivery, is geared to what these companies often do best – making the technology work for specific end users.
Turning that value-add consultancy or systems integration business into one that exploits Cloud delivery is now becoming a target for a growing number of those businesses, while some have already established themselves as recognised brands in their own right. One such is major pan-European channel storage services company, Proact. The company moved into the UK market last April with the acquisition of B2net. According to UK CEO – and ex-B2net boss, Jason Clark, there was a great deal of synergy in their approach to the target market.
Both companies focus on the storage marketplace, with NetApp as the main storage technology vendor. Proact has recently launched an implementation of NetApp’s FlexPod as the Proact `FlexPod as a Service’. This is built on a fully integrated flexible, scalable, infrastructure from VMware, Cisco and NetApp.
Clark claims that with a close to £60m turnover in the UK alone, it is now twice the size of any other channel vendor in the UK storage market.
He claims to be a long way ahead of others in the Cloud , having been taking enterprise class customers on to its storage platform for the last three and a half years and not telling the world anything about it.
Clark also sees scope for the UK end of Proact to benefit from the managed service business which has been spreading out through the group. The company has a 10-year track-record of building datacentre infrastructures for customers, so Clark has few concerns about building their own and using them to service customers.
He also observed that there was as yet little evidence that Cloud services were yet penetrating to the heart business. For example, he pointed to the lack of press stories announcing Cloud service providers winning large, multi-million pound, three-to-five year contracts for utility computing.
There are, of course, a number of possible answers to that. One is that he is right and most enterprise Cloud customers are still at the pilot project or evaluation stage. Another, however, is that the annuity payment model of the Cloud makes it very difficult to actually put those traditional, headline-grabbing total value numbers against any contract. A customer could hate a service after a year and dispense with it, or love it and still be using it in 10 year’s time.
A third possible answer is that storage is one of those Cloud services that has easily defined and understood functional boundaries, like email, and is therefore more geared to a utility-styled delivery. That, in turn, can generate the headline-grabbing, high value, extended term contracts.
