Vendors Ready to Partner in Telecom, Cloud Space

There are myriad opportunities for partnering in the telecommunications and cloud services space, and global IT vendors are eager to do so.

Seventy percent of vendors surveyed by Amazon Consulting said telecom service providers were “very strategic” to their 2011 indirect channel go-to-market plan. Beth Vanni, Amazon Consulting vice president, presented results from the survey of 64 global IT vendors at a Breakaway session on Wednesday.

Sixteen percent of the vendors were “still formulating a strategic fit” and 14 percent said telecommunications service providers were only “somewhat strategic” to their plans.

It’s part of the evolution of vendors seeing service providers more as partners than as customers, Vanni said.

Forty-five percent of vendors surveyed said they have global and national service providers as strategic alliance partners. Thirty-one percent said selected service providers are channel partners, while 12 percent said they were currently recruiting service provider channel partners. Only 12 percent said they saw service providers only as a customer.

The top two services global IT vendors want to leverage telecom service providers for in the next two years are Platform as a Service and hosted/SaaS applications, according to the survey results.

Jim Livingston, senior vice president for service provider Terremark, said his company is eager to leverage channel partners to provide cloud solutions and create an environment friendly to ISVs.

“Our intent is to stay very focused on the horizontal piece,” said Jim. “We want to work with the channel instead of around the channel.”

Vanni’s advice for vendors to optimize these partnerships was to first get the mechanics such as licensing, contracts and compensation right; address doubt internally and with existing partners; and revive solution certifications programs.