In my previous commentary in this space, I suggested that the evolution of the channel in the cloud is entering a new stage in its development. Last month’s Dreamforce conference, hosted by Salesforce.com, served as a showcase for a series of new channel initiatives which clearly indicate the growing importance cloud vendors are placing on the channel for their future success. Salesforce.com used its annual user conference as an opportunity to unveil a new series of partner programs.
The channel is becoming more and more important as cloud service providers grow their eco-systems around their offerings and move into more complicated configurations. This fact is demonstrated by Dell's purchase of Boomi and IBM acquisition of Cast Iron. Salesforce has an effective integration community lead by Appirio. As the ISVs proliferate around the major players the channel integration/brokers seem to be providing the glue to bundle a set of best of breed cloud services to entice the Enterprise to migrate their private clouds into ever increasingly complex hybrid configurations. Very interesting time in this space as the playing field is still very wide open.
Mark Mitchell Szynaka
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Dreamforce Takeaway: It's All About Cloud Channel Strategies
Posted by: Jeffrey M. Kaplan September 9, 2011 05:00 AMIn my previous commentary in this space, I suggested that the evolution of the channel in the cloud is entering a new stage in its development. Last month’s Dreamforce conference, hosted by Salesforce.com, served as a showcase for a series of new channel initiatives which clearly indicate the growing importance cloud vendors are placing on the channel for their future success. Salesforce.com used its annual user conference as an opportunity to unveil a new series of partner programs.
Mark Mitchell Szynaka