Page 1 of 3
It's been about a month since Cisco Systems' Dave O'Callaghan was promoted from the head of the vendor's distribution relationships to vice president, worldwide commercial sales, as part of a significant reorganization within the vendor's channel group.
CRN's Scott Campbell recently spoke with O'Callaghan at Tech Data's TechSelect conference in Las Vegas to get his take on Cisco's new organizational changes, cloud strategy and the pilot of a new compensation program that should be good news to VARs. Here's what he had to say:
First of all, congratulations on the promotion. What brings you to TechSelect? What's your message for VARs here?
I've come to talk cloud strategies, new business models. It's an exciting time for partners from TechSelect. We are on the forefront on business models that can augment their business around cloud and the expansion of managed services. The stats we've seen show that 60 percent of end users now believe cloud and managed services offerings are now valid. That's from Yankee Group. In addition, 70 percent are planning in the enterprise to use cloud in less than two years. That comes from Savvis.
What are the opportunities you see in cloud?
What we see in the cloud opportunity is three business models that the VAR can consider. They can be a cloud reseller, a cloud builder or a cloud provider. The first is really the VAR who says 'I want to be a cloud reseller.' I believe if they go that route, they'll look to a distributor to vet those thousands of cloud offerings out there. We will bring offerings that are consumable through a Tech Data. The next step up is the cloud builder. That is someone, more of the systems integrator, larger services business model. They're going to build the Vblock, the multi-tenant cloud for a managed service provider. The last guy, the cloud provider, he is the MSP or the large SI that wants to do hosting on their own. For those three models we see, we plan to create offerings.
What sorts of solutions offering are you guys building around the cloud?
I can give you an overview of that. It's based on those three pieces and we have three or four offerings we're building that will be exciting. We have the Vblock architecture from VCE [VMware, Cisco and EMC]. That whole architecture is for the high-end cloud provider or SI. You've got a desktop virtualization capability coming out that leverages our technology. That'll be a great offering for the VAR to take to their customer base. Virtual multi-tenancy and secure multi-tenancy are the others. Look for systems integrators to build that for MSPs and for MSPs to be the public cloud provider of multi tenancy. Those offerings will really fill the VAR's appetite for now in terms of what they go out and do.
Next: Fast Track 2 Products Coming
