CRN Cloud Services Roundtable: Leading The Cloud Education Charge For Partners

School's Open

During a cloud services roundtable hosted by CRN, four channel-focused cloud service provider executives described how they are helping partners get up to speed with cloud selling through education, training programs and conversations. Building trust between the cloud provider and the VAR, MSP and telecom agent is the first step in getting the channel up to speed with the cloud.

The roundtable, held at XChange Solution Provider 2017, included Scott Kinka, CTO and founding partner of Evolve IP; Keith Coker, CTO and founder of Green Cloud Technologies; Randy Jeter, CEO of RapidScale; and Andy Stewart, chief strategy officer for TierPoint.

The following are excerpts from the cloud services roundtable.

Tell us about the gaps you're seeing in terms of cloud expertise among the partner community.

Randy Jeter: "There’s a gap. There’s a gap in education for a lot of people. The VARs and MSPs are trying to figure out how they fit working with us versus us taking business from them."

Tell us about the gaps you're seeing in terms of cloud expertise among the partner community.

Andy Stewart: "[VARs] are used to selling and getting that big commission up front, and going to a residual model can be a challenge. They don’t want to embrace it. For us, a lot of the training is just trying to build up the trust first and foremost, helping to ask the right questions, make them look smart with the customers, and then go in together and really try to sell that solution at that time."

What is your organization doing in terms of cloud education, certifications or training for your partners?

Randy Jeter: "We built RapidScale University because I felt like we needed to deliver some type of education level ... it’s used for their sales teams. We look at it as we can get thousands of feet on the street. Let’s design and deploy a RapidScale University, and deploy classes and courses associated to basic cloud to more advanced cloud."

What is your organization doing in terms of cloud education, certifications, or training for your partners?

Andy Stewart: "We’ll never be just an AWS or an Azure reseller. The margins are just too low. It’s too low for us, let alone bringing in a partner. What we [are doing] is we offer a managed layer around [those services]. To justify that managed layer, we’re investing a lot in training and certifications, in automation and orchestration.

Should cloud education differ depending on the partner type -- VAR, MSP, telecom agent partner?

Scott Kinka: "That’s why the adoption’s been a little bit slower on the VAR side than on the telecom side. Out of the chute, [telecom agents] are more capable of having the conversation. They know the questions that we’re going to ask them to ask.

"It has a lot to do with how you educate them. It’s a very different model in terms of what you’re doing [with each partner] from educating them to really across the board."

Should cloud education differ depending on the partner type -- VAR, MSP, telecom agent partner?

Keith Coker: "About 60 percent of our revenue stream comes through managed service providers. … The VAR community, what I call the reseller community, is split with the remaining 40 percent. For VARs, we spend most of our time not educating them on the technical benefits or the technical solution, but more on the business plan discussion. How do they turn a commission structure or a sales plan from single large sales to recurring sales? Once we are through that discussion and have buyoff from a particular VAR, then we do see business pick up."

What role are master agents playing educating partners on cloud?

Andy Stewart: "[Master agents] have definitely been adding some value around the education in terms of helping the VARs, in particular, transition from selling boxes to selling a service. They’ve got the ear of certain VARs that really trust them. That’s, I think, where [master agents] are focusing. [They are doing] some interesting things around training, academies, tools and solutions selling to make it easier. There are 200,000 VAR sales agents out across the U.S. When you have 20, 30 years of history selling one way, transitioning to sell a different way is a challenge. The more people we have out there helping us educate and change that, the better."

What role are master agents playing educating partners on cloud?

Randy Jeter: "You want to give [solution providers] enough information to go out and bring [the cloud service provider] to the table. We find master agents now getting certifications on our courses internally, whereas two years ago, a year ago, that wasn’t even a thought process."

What role are master agents playing educating partners on cloud?

Scott Kinka: "We’re investing heavily in [master agent education programs]. We would never go around them -- there’s no reason to. It costs [cloud service providers] too much to do that [on their own]."

How important is it for cloud service providers to help educate their channel partners on cloud?

Randy Jeter: "I believe you need to be an educator at this point. We did this a long time ago. We felt like if we invested and put an education tool out there, we would get more value from it. We’ve got a lot of value from it. I always say to people, gain the knowledge on how to open the door to bring in a cloud company. … It's a partnership."

How important is it for cloud service providers to help educate their channel partners on cloud?

Andy Stewart: "I think what we’re focusing on doing is giving [partners] the core knowledge around what the service offerings are, and what the right questions are to ask. I think the questions that you ask can help you be portrayed as a thought leader, or at least understanding the challenges that the customer is going through."