Answers on Offshore Outsourcing Businesses

“Clouds”, for the last few years, has been the buzzword in the IT industry. When I say clouds, I don’t mean the fluffy white stuff in the sky that takes the shape of bunnies or babies depending on who’s looking. I think of clouds like virtual lockers that you can access anytime and anywhere you want. Clouds take the form of word processors, spread sheets, presentations, and other specialized applications.


channel sales strategy

While some of the clouds are free and open source like the Google docs that cause developers from Microsoft to gnash their teeth, most of the commercially available clouds are classified as SaaS or Software as a Service applications, meaning, instead of users paying a one time, big time fee to install the software, they pay a monthly or annual fee to keep using the application. To keep up with the evolution of clouds, do vendors and partner need to come up with new channel partner strategy?

Channel partners were at first, understandably worried about this innovation. In their minds, they were thinking, is this the end for me and my company? Who needs my services when users can directly access the application from the Internet? You see clouds are nifty in that you don’t need to install software to use it. Applications are easily accessible through browsers and all you need is a reliable internet connection and a PC or laptop and viola! You can access your files and perform transactions online. However, software vendor or in this case, cloud providers do play a vital role in educating the customers.

For VARs or Value Added Retailers, the mode of payment may change but the business just evolved to include more customers who can afford the applications they sell. Channel partner strategy for cloud products seemed to be pretty much the same as when they are selling traditional software licensing. Incentives and commissions are still there to motivate channel partners to sell not software per se but subscriptions to applications instead.