**Editor’s Note: Click here for a list of August’s important channel-program changes you should know or here for our recently compiled list of new products and services.**

IndependenceIT is rolling out a new App Services delivery platform and a new channel program for ISVs and MSPs to facilitate deployment of application services.

App Services is designed for service providers to set up and manage application collections that can be delivered directly to any end-user device or published to an existing Cloud Workspace environment. It offers IT administrators an application publishing model with driven workflow to define a new service, creation of software-defined data center (SDDC) server infrastructure, application installation and management, and the publishing of applications to users or groups of users from a range of end-user organizations.

Chip Buck, IndependenceIT’s CTO and co-founder, tells Channel Partners that the new partner program is built around App Services, but is available to all of the company’s current partners. The program provides an on-ramp for ISVs and MSPs entering the cloud-based application market, with licensing priced at $100 per month per SDDC, including the entire software suite and the management of up to 15 Active Directory users or management of 50 VMs.

“We are maintaining our original licensing methodology, which is purely a per user consumption-based approach,” he said. “App Services and the new program are definitely well suited to ISVs and to those MSPs who are very vertically focused, and there are a number of those in the market that are focused … on legal or medical, or insurance … and there are a few that are focused on retail. For them, it actually helps speed to market their offerings, and how they build and provision their offering.”{ad}

The App Services platform uses IndependenceIT’s automation engine to support IT service providers with: automated services setup; user entitlement management; data layer abstraction; automated platform scaling and resource management; workload scheduling; automated service scaling; virtual data center activity logging; and an API for integration.

App Services can be deployed on Windows Azure, Amazon, Google Cloud, or any public, private or hybrid cloud Infrastructure.

“It’s giving (partners) another set of tools for even more rapid scalability,” Buck said. “The focus of our tool set is to allow for …

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… high-intensity scalability, even before App Services, and to allow partners to get the most bang for their buck out of their technical labor. That is one of the biggest costs that service providers have, their technical staff. And to the extent that we can automate services, and make the support and service component as easy as possible, that’s a big savings for them. App Services ratchets that up to a whole new level, and really allows for almost completely automated, set it and forget it.”

According to IDC, “cloud services spending will continue to grow at double-digit rates for the next few years, gradually accounting for a larger proportion of all IT spending.”

“With App Services, we are able to streamline our business with greater efficiency and scalability,” said Mike Callan, CEO of Swizznet. “The ability to offer application services in a profitable and efficient manner has been made possible by IndependenceIT’s partner program which features unmatched sales margins and a well-defined support structure. The organization has also been very helpful at all stages of implementation which has accelerated our time to revenue.”