Channel Pro - February 2009

vary widely (see “What the Heck Is Cloud Computing Anyway?”). But if you thought it was just about software as a service (SaaS), get ready: There’s a new cloud on the block. Web-based platform offerings from Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and a host of lesser-known players I’d say about ^with ^names ^like ^FlexiScale ^and ^Joyent ^arecatching on fast—especially with SMBs. And 20 percent of

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while some channel pros question their relia- what we do is in bility and security, others are finding lucrative new ways to profit from them. “The opportuni- one way or another ties are definitely out there,” Dempsey says.

involved with the Amazon

CAPACITY ON THE FLY [Web Services] platform.

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SMBs are responsible for a great deal of 250,000 in four feverish days, its Amazon that spiking demand. “The most popular Web Services infrastructure automatically users of cloud platforms out there are small kept pace, adding some 3,300 servers worth businesses,” says James Staten, a principal of capacity on the fly.

analyst at Forrester Research Inc. That’s no surprise, he adds. Notoriously short on cash, SMBs were bound to find an infrastructure model that frees them from buying and maintaining hardware attractive. Plus, since cloud vendors charge customers only for the platform resources they use, there’s no overspending on underused server and storage capacity. “If your business is small and stays small, so does your bill,” Staten notes. If you grow, your IT costs grow no faster than the rest of your company.

Platform-as-a-service offerings provide increased flexibility too. Traditional server hosting companies usually insist on long-term rental agreements. Most cloud providers, however, let businesses tap into their resources for as long or short as they like. “Give them your credit card number and you’re in business,” Staten says. And you can scale that business as far and as quickly as you want.

Consider the case of New York City-based Animoto Productions. The digital media start-up’s Web site, Animoto.com, converts still images into music videos. When membership on the site grew from 25,000 to

portability between clouds is extremely limited, so migrating solutions from one cloud to another can be somewhere between a chore and an impossibility.

MANAGEMENT MUSCLE REQUIRED

Meanwhile, few SMBs can afford the kind of data center management muscle that cloud vendors employ. Most cloud platforms have multiple layers of redundancy at every potential point of failure, not to mention armies of technicians on 24/7 standby. And though some companies worry about the dangers of sharing server space with strangers, security is usually tighter in the cloud too. “We can afford data protection and fault-tolerance solutions that are far more robust than most of our clients can [af-ford],” says Mike Eaton, CEO of Cloudworks, a provider of cloud-based desktop and server solutions in Thousand Oaks, Calif.

Not that cloud platforms aren’t without their drawbacks, of course. For one thing, while most cloud vendors offer service-level agreements (SLAs), they rarely promise—or achieve—the fabled “five 9s” of availability. Indeed, both Amazon EC2 and Google App Engine experienced highly publicized, mul-tihour outages last June. Then there’s the problem of vendor “lock in.” Today, at least,

HIGH DOLLARS PER HOUR

Even so, cloud platforms continue to attract users. “At the beginning of [2008], cloud computing was a neat new idea that only some early adopters were using,” says technology evangelist Michael Sheehan of GoGrid, a cloud platform provider in San Francisco and a division of ServePath. “Now I believe it should be included side by side with any IT recommendation that an IT reseller or solution provider delivers.”

And not just because customers like the new technology option, Sheehan and others say. The platform-as-a-service model has plenty to offer channel pros too. For starters, handing infrastructure management off to a cloud vendor enables solution providers to focus on more sophisticated tasks, like strategic IT consulting and customizing business applications.

“Those sorts of things tend to be higher dol-lar-per-hour opportunities,” Eaton notes. Moreover, as adoption of cloud-

based services accelerates, businesses are sure to need help integrating them, both with each other and with on-premise systems. “There’s a

EATON pretty big gap in the market in terms of delivering that ex-

pertise,” observes Kris Tuttle, director of research at analyst firm Research 2.0.

Leveraging the cloud could prove beneficial to managed service providers (MSPs) as well. Tapping into platform-as-a-service products enables MSPs to sell processing power and storage space along with the usual remote monitoring and backup services. SMBs are likely to find such an all-inclusive, “no capital option” tempting, says Brian Wolff, vice president of sales and marketing at BlueLock Co., a cloud provider with headquarters in Indianapolis.