North America Channel Breakout — Priorities
Competition in the Web hosting market continues to rise. The latest example involves Salesforce.com, which has unveiled a new service -- called Force.com Sites -- that allows customers to run their Web sites in the Salesforce.com cloud. The move comes only a few days after Microsoft launched its Azure cloud services.
In the
North America Partner Breakout, hosted by Dell EMC’s Gregg Ambulous, senior
vice president, North America channel sales, partners learned about the 2020 NA
Channel priorities: Accelerate the channel; accelerate storage growth; get the Data
Protection Suite back to growth; protect the base and take share; and
collaborate and accelerate account penetration.
Joe,
Good observation. Looks like the next bubble will be in the cloud where every large vendor would be trying to become a cloud platform. I have a feeling salesforce.com is getting too ambitious here. They do not have the deep pockets of a google or a microsoft or the expertise of an Amazon. Their profit margins in their current business are quite low. So they are desperately trying to become a platform. I am doubtful about their strategy. They will be better off staying focused at the application layer leaving the bottom layer of the cloud infrastructure to others.
On your comment “But I expect a hybrid approach to emerge, where customers mix and match their on-premise options with cloud services”, we at Vembu also strongly believe in a hybrid approach. In that context I think Microsoft’s software plus services approach seems to make the most sense. But whether Microsoft would execute this right is another question.
Sekar.
Vembu Technologies
Sekar: Thanks for your perspective. MSFT’s approach (software + service) does make the most sense. But they’ve alienated a few partners by offering SaaS direct (as an option). Microsoft really had no other choice in the matter but I don’t think VARs will forgive the company for making that direct SaaS move.
You’ll find another follow-up blog from Vembu here. The topic is backing up to the cloud. Full disclosure: Of course blog is vendor-specific but it does offer some more info on how cloud-based storage works.