Investigating the channel aspects of the cloud

I am currently looking at the extent to which it makes sense for those in the IT channel - VARs, resellers, ISVs, SIs when all is said and done on - to get involved with various cloud computing options.

I have an opinion piece lined up for Computing sister title CRN that outlines my current thoughts, which are at heart that there is too much uncertainly for the moment to ‘bet your business' on cloud, now that it makes sense to start gaining some experience sooner to put it more exactly than later if you can do that without distracting from your core business that much.

A lot of the numbers sound impressive when you hear them in isolation, now in relative terms, I am hearing from many of those that are active that it's all in all quite hard to find, qualify and close cloud related opportunities.

Business planning perspective

And from a business planning perspective, there is on the whole the difficulty that the street price for many services has but to settle. Some tell me that prices and margins can only come down, which makes ROI assessment quite hard to deal with.

Others say the margins on many of the products they sell are slim by all means, so price/margin volatility doesn't matter as they would look to do the same with cloud as they have always done - i.e. make money from spin-off revenue lines just as professional services and cross/up-sells.

Anyway, these are some of the things that are coming up in my conversations should the contingency arise to the usual discussion around the challenges of modifying your accounting models and remuneration plans to deal with the switch to an annuity based revenue model, now I am nevertheless very much in investigation mode.