Channel hopping to third party virtualisation

I’ve never claimed to be an IT channel journalist. In fact, I was at a lunch with the newly reborn Gateway (no longer 2000) recently alongside some tech channel press and was suitably impressed by their array questions most of which were completely alien to me. How much, when will it be available, what about reseller support etc? All good stuff if you’re into the technical mechanics of box shifting and beyond, but quite lost on me I’m afraid.

Staying focused on software development issues as I try to do, I rarely have to absorb too much of the channel’s machinations and general goings on. But new cloud delivery frameworks may mean that this will not always be so. I say this because I have been talking to a managed IT services provider in London called Cobweb that is using automation products from Parallels to supply third party hosted solutions.

Is this where the channel meets the cloud and the developer cognoscenti are compelled to appreciate the commercial needs of the IT delivery layer in a more direct manner then? It may be so.

Business applications and services, including Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint and Microsoft Dynamics CRM are being virtualised, optimised, delivered and – most crucially of all – repackaged into a ‘white labeled’ third party format as they are sold on to a new customer audience of VARs and System Integrators who remain largely unaware of the underlying framework.

I learned a fair bit about Parallels and the company’s Operations Automation and Business Automation products when I attended their annual ‘Summit’ show at the start of this year. I think it’s an interesting commercial reality that many of us fail to consider when looking at cloud computing constructs i.e. who meters, packages and bills this kind of technology?

This style of “fully branded self-service portal” is arguably where the cloud is selling most vibrantly. If I had a commercial brain I might like to suggest that this is a key area and delivery mechanism to watch out for.

Quoting briefly from the corporate PR smorgasbord of collateral on offer to try and give you a flavour of what customers are actually saying, I’ll list this comment from a decent chap who I have spoken to several times called Dan Germain, CTO at Cobweb Solutions.

“Parallels Automation allows us to improve user experience whilst streamlining our internal processes and offering more flexible opportunities to resellers. This is a very important strategic move and puts Cobweb in a perfect position to maximise the interest in and growth of cloud computing. It also gives resellers an attractive alternative to Microsoft’s new Business Online Productivity Suite, giving them better overall control, not to mention advantageous profit margins,” said Germain.

So there you have it – a kind of virtualisation/channel/developer/commercial/hosted-services type of a story that, I hope, brings the cloud down to earth by just another few feet.