Everywhere solution providers seem to turn these days application vendors are teaming up with cloud service providers to create an integrated offering delivered by the application vendor as a managed service. In some cases, channel partners might welcome that development. If the application vendor absorbs all the capital costs associated with delivering a service, that the solution provider can focus all their efforts on providing higher-margin integration services.
The problem is not every customer or solution provider is happy when their application service provider partners with, for example, Amazon Web Services (AWS). There are many customers that not surprisingly consider Amazon to be a direct competitor. Other customers may not be huge fans of Microsoft or Google.
That natural tension is giving rise to an opportunity for solution providers to partner with Rackspace to create an alternative cloud stack for almost every application, says Lisa McLin, vice president of channel sales for Rackspace, which provides managed services aimed primarily at IT infrastructure. While Adobe, for example, may have decided to standardize on Microsoft Azure to deliver its cloud services, McLin notes that Rackspace with Adobe’s blessing is actively demonstrating how to deploy the company’s applications on AWS. Despite its relationship with Microsoft, Adobe knows many organizations have already decided to standardize on AWS. Trying to convince those customers to embrace Microsoft Azure or any other cloud platform is just too hard a sell.
Unless an application vendor refuses to make its software available any other way than as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) application, McLin says Rackspace and its channel partners will thrive providing such alternative could platform options.
Many channel partners, of course, are still getting used to the idea of partnering with a managed services provider such as Rackspace that they may compete with for infrastructure services. But as multi-cloud computing continues to evolve, application vendors, cloud service providers and IT services firms are all going to find themselves collaborating in new and sometimes strange ways, says McLin. Rackspace is making a case that IT services firms that focus on applications in partnership with Rackspace will make more money than those that try to service the entire stack themselves.
“We think this will be the big trend for 2019,” says McLin.
In the meantime, regardless of what cloud platform an application vendor decides to standardize on, McLin says channel partners would always do well to remember there is always going to be a customer unhappy with that choice.
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