SNIA EUROPE I CLOUD COMPUTING
Partnerships between IT professionals and IT solution providers in the era of the Cloud
JASON BEAL SNIA Europe member, Ingram Micro EMEA
In the last year or so there has been an endless amount of dialog and debate as to whether the IT solution provider community would continue to be the primary route-to-market and resale and deliver channel for cloud computing solutions. Jason Beal, SNIA Europe member, Ingram Micro EMEA, writes.
Would businesses, be them small SMBs without dedicated IT personnel or perhaps with one “IT guy,” or larger enterprise companies with professional in-house IT departments, Directors of IT, or CIOs, continue to buy the bulk of their technology solutions from a local IT solution provider? Or would end-users now simply ‘buy direct’ to access IaaS, SaaS, and other hosted solutions directly over the internet without relying on a local IT solution provider?
With cloud computing technology solutions, one must not confuse the ease of access and ordering with the ease of implementation and integration with existing business processes and on-premise IT systems and infrastructure. To point-n-click, procure, and provision the almost unlimited availability of SaaS applications, hosted infrastructure, and on-demand virtual compute capacity is simply the first step for incorporating cloud computing technologies into the business and optimizing their capabilities and advantages.
The reality is that cloud computing adds one more level of complexity to an already complex IT world for businesses and IT professionals. Many in-house IT organizations are already struggling to have deep expertise and specialization in each of the sub-categories of IT, be it security, storage, networking, virtualization, data center environmental, voice and communications, business applications, etc. It’s the classic “Jack of All Trades, Master of None” situation facing a lot in-house IT departments, particularly in recent years with economic challenges putting more pressure on headcount and
8 SEPTEMBER 2011 |
WWW.SNSEUROPE.COM
budgets. A business simply cannot afford any longer to employ as large of an in-house IT staff as would be required to have a top notch virtualization and data center guru, a highly certified IT security specialized, an application designer and developer, a certified voice and video engineer, etc. to cover all the specialized fields in IT. Further, the era of Cloud, with the “power of choice” available between on-line cloud computing technologies and on-premise technologies comes yet additional responsibilities and demands on the in- house IT professionals.
IT professionals working for businesses of all sizes and sophistication should have a realistic expectation that cloud computing technologies will not ‘auto- magically’ integrate into legacy IT systems and business processes. There is still a lot of expertise, customization, and integration work, which is required to really optimize cloud computing technologies within the business.
As such, the relevance and value-add of the local IT solution provider to the end-user business and in-house IT team remains. In fact the partnership between the in-house IT professionals and the local IT solution provider should expand and become much more strategic for the benefit of the business. [Note that the emphasis here is on partnership rather than “outsourcing” or sub-contracting.]
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