CHANNEL PARTNERS EVOLUTION — The Cloud Computing Lab at Channel Partners Evolution highlighted how much progress has been made and new ways for partners to cash in by digging deeper.

The Lab was sponsored by Synnex and featured BRM Box, Evolve IP, mTusker, NaviSite, Rackspace, RapidScale and Sungard Availability Services.

Joe Gallo, Synnex’s senior solutions architect, said the changes in cloud computing since last year have been “incredible.”

“It’s much easier to enable these applications up in the cloud,” he said. “It’s much easier to migrate your existing data out of the old resources and up in there because we have a brand-new set of tools that do it quickly, easily and more importantly securely.”{ad}

Partners now have a set of tools they can bring to their end users and explain productivity advances that they can implement today, Gallo said. They can do proof of concepts, if it doesn’t work no one’s out of any great sum of money, he said.

“And it is a service model,” he said. “It is not selling someone a product and walking away. It’s continuous revenue and increased revenue by adding new features and functionality. You go back 50 years ago and people used to trade in their cars every two years because you could economically do that. Now, we hold onto cars four years, six years, eight years. Let’s get back to driving that new, shiny car and making a good impression with our customers all the time. With ongoing, you’re always getting the latest and greatest, you don’t have to wait.”

Randy Jeter, RapidScale’s CEO, said the lab is a good setup for people to stop by and share their issues.

“With RapidScale being a leader in the space and maturing, we’re answering questions that people need to have answered,” he said “This a very niche set of vendors talking about cloud specifically and ultimately there’s a value to that.”

At previous cloud labs, security was a major concern and source of apprehension, but that’s not the case anymore, Gallo said.

“If you look at the latest, huge breaches that we talk about – the Targets, the Home Depots – those were all on-premises breaches because they can’t keep up with the latest security trends,” he said. “In the cloud, there’s an army of security personnel making sure these applications are built securely and they stay secure. And that didn’t exist 10 years ago anywhere.”