If you haven’t signed up for HostingCon Global yet, there is still time! I’d love to see you there. If you’ll be there and want to meet, please give me a shout at nicole.henderson[at]penton.com.

See you in New Orleans! Make sure to pack your shorts. I’ve heard it can get quite warm in Louisiana in the summer.

Source: TheWHIR

So how do MSPs, CSPs and other service providers decide which vendors to choose, and what is the right mix? If partnerships are rushed into without careful consideration, providers may experience relationships that do not produce an ROI or do not generate new business. TCC research shows that 50-60% of vendor partnerships do not get off the ground after contract signing.

One of the most significant opportunities is getting the business strategy and vendor mix right.

Often times, a strategy session is needed to map out the solutions offered and the verticals in which success is experienced to uncover where the opportunities for growth. Helping clients make the transition from on premise to cloud continues to be an incredible opportunity; assisting customers in determining what they need to do for sustained success in the cloud is more and more important.

Specialized new cloud-based services are emerging every day. Sometimes these specialized vendor players can make a huge impact on our ecosystem; or it’s an industry with a new cloud offering that can best assist us.

Building and prioritizing key growth areas for new services is essential. Take for example, some of the more interesting services highlighted in a recent post in MSP Mentor.

7 Managed Services Offering Trends to watch in 2016:

Remote monitoring for BYOD policies and protection
Enterprise Mobility Management for mobile devices
Internet of Things for everything connected
Identity and access management for two-factor authentication
Cloud backup services for data protection
Compliance as a service for meeting regulatory compliances
Remote monitoring and management

Building a rich and trusted ecosystem with the right mix of partners is essential:

Hardware and Software Vendors
Service Provider Vendors
Contracting Services Companies
Two Tier Distributors
Other Managed and Cloud Business Service Companies

Combining the right relationships from the right types of partners enable our customer base, differentiate us from our competition and enable our top line growth.

In addition to technology, product and solutions, here are some other considerations.

It’s important to evaluate the entire “partnering experience” with the vendor.
What is the commitment the vendor has to the channel?
Would this new vendor put us in the position to have to balance a potentially competitive relationship?
Will we need to consider competitive aspects, either with another partner or vendor in our ecosystem, or with a vendor’s direct sales organization?
When these competitive situations arise, how will we manage ongoing successful sales engagements?

To fully consider our vendor mix, we need to have careful considerations in all facets of this relationship including:

Vendor Strategy
Vendor strategy ideally lines up with go to market strategy and existing services offerings. Do service providers choose go with many different, smaller best of breed partners, or one large significant player that can offer many different services? There are pros and cons with both strategies. Providers should evaluate the exact value proposition, the verticals served and what benefits can be expected from the different strategies, then make a choice.

Vendor’s Partner Experience
What is the partner experience like? Are they a partner-centric organization where all of their business is done with partners, or do they also have a direct sales organization? What percentage of their revenue is done with partners? Also look at partner program features: cloud programs, like deal registrations, conflict management policies, partner account managers, support and executive sponsorship. Can we gauge the level of their partner commitment by looking at their website and other public-facing materials? Do they have a vibrant partner ecosystem themselves? If partners are not a priority for them, then it may be tough to get the partner experience needed to be successful.

Partner Program Service and Support Model
From what we know about the vendor’s program, what is the expectation for training and certifications and what is the method and quality of their training programs? Some of the smaller players might not be as mature as the bigger market leaders, but what is really important to the business?

If there is a clear and defined onboarding and ramping plan, can service and delivery teams get what they need out of it and for what investment? Ultimately, will we be able to profit from this program, or will we struggle to even come up to speed for the investment cost estimates?

Quality of Service and Support
When considering any vendor, providers must look at their overall quality of service and support. This is the time to really test the extent of their technical and sales support. Are the vendor teams quickly available on the phone, or does it take 10 minutes just to get someone live? How well is the vendor staff trained and ready to help? Explore and test-drive the tools they offer, the online capabilities, community supported knowledge base and any analytics they offer.

When we are live with a client solution, we need to be sure we have a partner at our side.

Compatibility
Consider compatibility with the other services offered. The tight integration between service offerings will directly affect the services delivered to clients. Do the vendors together offer interoperability certifications or programs; are there reference architectures of different service offerings on which to capitalize?

Marketing Support
As you continue to build out your brand, will the vendors aligned with support that goal? Within their program, does the vendor offer marketing support? If so, what type and extent are they willing to help? Will they provide content for marketing efforts? Are they going to help with lead generation, or even pass on leads? What kind of extended support or concierge services can be expected from them? The extent of the support given here will directly impact the entire vendor experience.

The last key area is ensuring the vendor also fits well into the business’ broad partner ecosystem around cloud services.

This brings us to another key area in the go to market model: building out the ecosystem. Not only will it stand to differentiate the provider in the marketplace, it also creates space for a significant trend in this industry, which is, partners, within the same ecosystem, partnering together.

Collaborations between MSP or cloud partners can strengthen offerings and increase competitive position. When new solution offerings are built, it may create opportunities for complementary partners and services to work together.

For example, I was recently at a conference and led a discussion about security. Two MSPS; an integrator focused on storage and networking explored the opportunity to partner with a highly oriented security and compliance as a service MSP in completely different geographies of the country. This example highlights how MSPs and solution providers working together can be a strong value proposition with the right negotiated terms and rules of engagement up front. .

Having collaboration, trust and unified goals to ensure alignment, along with a customer experience that is supportive, smooth and very successful, are key for these relationships’ success.

That is just one example. Service providers could have on premise solutions collaborating with cloud services, analytics services partnering with compliance services or hosting partnering with communications.

Whatever the mix, having a common set of goals, and building a track record of successful clients will strengthen the overall proposition and ultimately our ecosystem.

This post explored the overall vendor mix and compatibility strategies when building an ecosystem, what they might look like and some of the challenges in building our vendor/partner relationships. In part two of this series, we will look at the best practices in managing vendor/partner relationships and successful ecosystem communication strategies.

Join me at HostingCon July 24-27 to explore partnerships in even more depth.

Source: TheWHIR

The developer market is a huge focus for cloud providers, and this acquisition will certainly help support AWS’ pitch to developers. It is unclear exactly how AWS will utilize Cloud9 or its technology.

READ MORE: DigitalOcean Launches Block Storage in Response to Developer Demand

According to a brief blog post on Thursday by Cloud9 CEO Ruben Daniels, the company will work with AWS on “terrific customer offerings for the future.”

“On the occasion of this amazing milestone for Cloud9, I’d like to take this moment to express our appreciation for the trust you’ve placed in Cloud9 over the years and to say how excited we are at this new beginning and the opportunity to bring you more and more value under the AWS umbrella,” Daniels said. “Thanks so much for your business, and stay tuned for even more great things to come!”

The startup is based in both Amsterdam and San Francisco with less than 50 employees.

Cloud9 also launched a development environment built exclusively for Salesforce developers last August, described as a “seamless, unified hub for all your Salesforce projects and development needs – that is always up to date.”

“The workspace automatically communicates with the Salesforce platform to synchronize any changes you make, allowing you to fully focus on coding,” Cloud9 said.

Salesforce recently announced that it had selected AWS as its preferred cloud provider, a huge win for the public cloud company. Aside from its own investments, Salesforce could be a good partner in helping AWS sign on more developer customers. In June, Salesforce launched a $50 million fund for developers.

Source: TheWHIR

HBO’s brilliant satirical take on the San Francisco Bay Area tech scene is where converged infrastructure vendors have found their perfect place for product placement.

But compared to the subtle appearances of SimpliVity’s OmniCube on the show – that’s what the much dreaded “box” Pied Piper was forced to build by its promptly ousted CEO Jack Barker was based on – the appearance Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s Synergy on the season finale is a rather clunky feat of enterprise product placement.

More on HPE Synergy: HPE Rethinks Enterprise Computing

The show generally gets things right about tech, the business and the technology. As we’ve pointed out before, it has been fairly spot-on on the data center side of things too, so it was puzzling to see HPE’s latest and greatest in data center gear, its composable infrastructure machine, sitting among the more fitting mess of servers, cables, milk crates, and tool shelves Gilfoyle had concocted to support the startup’s IT requirements earlier.

Pied Piper is out of money at this point, and it’s hard to believe it can afford HPE’s latest iteration on converged infrastructure, let alone one whose official shipping date is unclear at the moment. Besides, hasn’t Pied Piper already migrated to the cloud?

You can see the HPE Synergy rack briefly in the beginning of this promo clip for the season finale:

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Source: TheWHIR

In a statement, Microsoft said: “We obviously welcome today’s decision by the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. The decision is important for three reasons: it ensures that people’s privacy rights are protected by the laws of their own countries; it helps ensure that the legal protections of the physical world apply in the digital domain; and it paves the way for better solutions to address both privacy and law enforcement needs.”

Privacy protections for information stored on paper should persist as data moves to the cloud. This decision helps ensure this result.

— Brad Smith (@BradSmi) July 14, 2016

The warrant’s legality was previously upheld by an appeals court in April 2014. Microsoft appealed that decision in December 2014, after risking contempt of court in a procedural dispute. The tech giant launched a website to promote its position, sued the Department of Justice, and has publically acknowledged a need for cloud providers, particularly in the U.S., to win consumer trust.

The second appeal has been upheld by a panel of three judges sitting for the US Court of Appeals Second Circuit, who ruled that: “(Subsection) 2703 of the Stored Communications Act does not authorize courts to issue and enforce against U.S.‐based service providers warrants for the seizure of customer e‐mail content that is stored exclusively on foreign servers.”

Representatives for lobby groups including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the i2Coalition, and for tech companies including Rackspace, Apple, Amazon, Cisco, Hewlett-Packard, and Verizon, as well as for Ireland the European Parliament all submitted briefs in supported of Microsoft’s position.

“We conclude that Congress did not intend the SCA’s warrant provisions to apply extraterritorially,” the judges said in the ruling (PDF). “The focus of those provisions is protection of a user’s privacy interests. Accordingly, the SCA does not authorize a US court to issue and enforce an SCA warrant against a United States‐based service provider for the contents of a customer’s electronic communications stored on servers located outside the United States.”

The ruling also pointed out that Microsoft had already produced “non-content information” that was stored in the U.S.

The Seattle Times reports speculation by lawyers following the case that the government would appeal the appellate decision if it lost.

Source: TheWHIR

“Our customers come to Rackspace for Fanatical Support and our standard is to serve those customers with 100 percent AWS certified technologists,” Chris Cochran, senior vice president and general manager of AWS at Rackspace said in a statement. “To meet customer demand, we have more than doubled the number of Rackspace AWS certifications since the launch of our offering in late 2015.”

Rackspace began offering Azure and Office 365 through its partner network earlier this month, on the heels of a report suggesting Azure is gaining market share rapidly on AWS. Rackspace also began offering managed Magento environments on AWS in June.

Managed services, particularly on AWS, have driven growth for Rackspace since Fanatical Support for AWS was launched less than a year ago, although the company also recently moved 90 employees from public cloud to other areas.

Source: TheWHIR

“Lex is well prepared for this new role, where he’ll be focused on increasing LeaseWeb USA’s rapid growth in the U.S. market while bringing the spirit of the Amsterdam company to our customers there,” Con Zwinkels, global CEO of LeaseWeb said in a statement. “Lex’s extensive experiences as an entrepreneurial technology leader will help us continue to bring our winning formula of secure, affordable cloud-hosting solutions to our customers.”

“LeaseWeb USA is backed by one of the world’s largest hosting providers, but operates in the United States as an agile provider of innovative solutions,” said Boost. “It’s been a tremendous opportunity to work in a place with that mix of boldness and capacity. I look forward to continuing to use my entrepreneurial passion and knowledge of the U.S. market to lead LeaseWeb USA toward greater accomplishments.”

LeaseWeb appointed an internationally advisory board in late 2015, and launched in vCloud service in Asia in April as part of its global expansion.

Source: TheWHIR