The topic of building effective channel alliances in the Cloud continues to gain greater attention. This past week, I spoke at two events and attended a third in the Boston area in which Cloud channel strategies and solutions were a central theme.

The first event was a local gathering called, “Mondays in the Cloud”, organized by Sonian and hosted at the UMass-Boston Venture Development Center. The session was kicked off by Greg Arnette, Sonian’s Founder and CTO, who provided his perspective on the state of the Cloud marketplace. I followed Greg with a talk about the Cloud industry trends driving the demand for a stronger channel network to build on the initial success of Cloud services. My talk was followed by Erik Sebesta of cloudTP who talked about how Cloud integration services companies like his are becoming an important channel to market for Cloud vendors seeking to sell private … Read More »

Dell’s announcement today of a new EqualLogic PS6000 series of storage arrays might appear to be a straightforward attempt to elevate the company’s stature in enterprise data centers. But, I think the company has an opportunity to aim higher than that.

Dell has always been about providing better computers at a lower price by finding economies at every stage of the development and delivery supply-chain. Some call this commoditizing markets. Others see it disintermediating the channel. Anyway you look at it, from its inception, Dell has been in the business of redefining and disrupting the way the computer industry operates.

Dell helped to bring PCs and laptops to the masses via direct online sales. It made it easy for companies to acquire servers in the same fashion. Now, Dell is setting its sites on transforming the way companies operate their data centers by leveraging … Read More »