Up in the Air About Cloud Computing?

Agent Michael Murphy, CEO of NEF Inc., agreed. NEF, an agency specializing in high-capacity bandwidth and data center sales, began selling cloud computing services in 2009 and has a handful of customers so far and expects to close a lot more in 2010. “It’s easy to start the conversation about it. The challenge comes in converting what customers have today,” Murphy said, noting that existing contracts for colo space or servers that are not at the end of life can present obstacles. “We are seeing more success with new deployments and disaster recovery deployments.”

Latisys’ Merkel said disaster recovery is a major hot button for cloud sales. VARs selling storage, for example, will find customers reticent to buy two SANs for redundancy but more than willing to purchase cloud-based replication into a data center.

Similarly, the interest and requirements also vary by customer segment, said Hosted Solutions’ Lee. SMBs, for example, are more likely to be interested in a total outsourcing with SaaS over the top while a large enterprise may be looking at outsourcing computing to run a single application, he said. A customer may start by putting storage in the cloud and, after finding success there, migrate additional IT resources later.

Murphy said NEF leans heavily on the vendors’ sales engineers when discussions get technical, but most channel programs have options that don’t require heavy lifting. The providers PHONE+ spoke to for this article generally offered two tiers of sales partnerships — referral and reseller. The referral/affiliate models generally paid a one-time bounty for converted leads. The reseller programs generally offered wholesale/discounted pricing to the partner who would mark up and bill the service and provide some level of customer support.

Hosted Solutions only offers a referral program, but its partners are compensated on a residual basis around 5 percent to 10 percent per month. Terremark also offers residual commission opportunities on a negotiated basis as an extension of its standard bounty-based referral program. It also has a white-label program for companies that want to rebrand the service as their own. In addition to referral and reseller options, Latisys also offers an agency program with residual payments in exchange for greater involvement in the sale and volume commitments. VISI plans to offer affiliate, reseller and private-label alternatives when its channel program launches in first quarter of 2010; affiliates will get $25 and VARs will earn about 14 percent while private-label deals will be negotiated on a one-off basis.