It's not too early to call 2010 as the year of the cloud for the channel. Solution providers, from the smallest to the biggest players, were getting their hands around the cloud and planning their 2010 cloud sales strategy.

The cloud frenzy at Tech Innovators began with a bang up keynote session from technology visionary Kim Polese, one of the driving forces behind the Java programming language that forever changed web application development, told solution providers that the cloud and mobile computing revolutions have opened the door for "exponential" sales growth and "higher margins."

Polese, the CEO of SpikeSource, which is driving a new applications revolution with its automated app certification service, said the blistering pace of technology change has made it a "wonderful time" to be a solution provider.

Steve Rosenthal, vice president of Gap International,a global management consulting company headquartered in Philadelphia, offered more practical advice as it relates to the cloud.

Realizing that the human brain is wired for certainty and predictability and avoiding threat, Rosenthal advised Tech Innovator attendees to "interrupt and bypass the brain system" in order to drive extraordinary sales growth.

"If first base is current thinking and second base is extraordinary thinking, you can't steal second base without taking your foot off first," said Rosenthal.

Finally, the cloud computing panel that closed the show featured practical advice on what solution providers need to do to get into the fast growing market.

Jayne Stommel, president of JWS Group Inc, a 16 year old Plainfield, Indiania solution provider, said she's ready to make a move to the cloud model after attending the event. Stommel said it was not having solid grasp of what precisely is the new cloud model that was holding her back.

All it took was some hands on advice from panelists to get her excited about making the move.

Bobby Napiltonia, a cloud channel pioneer who drove huge sales growth for partners at Salesforce.com., the leading cloud applications provider, stressed that cloud solution providers have built multimillion dollar businesses with robust margins. It's a mistake, he said, to get trapped into believing that it's just about the per user, per year commission model.

Patrick Ciccarelli, president and CEO of Varsity Technologies, a San Francisco, Calif. solution provider focused on the small business market, in fact, has moved into a much higher level strategic consulting role with his customers by focusing on the cloud.

Ciccarelli, who has recently moved customers away from big infrastructure purchases to cloud based purchases, said that has won him a more trusted, strategic advisor position with his customers. By the way, Ciccarelli is directing his clients on what products or services they should buy to move to the cloud even if he doesn't have the reseller relationship with the vendor. That says a lot. Think of Varsity Technologies as a McKinsey & Co. like consultant for businesses.

John Ross, chief technology officer of GreenPage, one of the most respected national solution providers, meanwhile, said GreenPages is seeing a large amount of business from customers looking for strategic advice on network infrastructure and architecture as they plan the the move first to private cloud and then to public cloud.

GreenPages been on the cutting edge of the private cloud movement with a strategic relationship with EMC, VMware and Cisco that is driving a lot of Fortune 500 private cloud activity.

On the vendor front, you know it's a mature market when you see breakthrough products coming to the market for small medium business solution providers. That was certainly the case at Tech Innovator's 2009 where LongJump, a Sunnyvale, Calif. cloud innovator that delivers an easy on ramp, end to end platform for SMB VARs looking to move the cloud, was voted by solution providers as the "Most Innovative Technology" at the event.

Rick McEachern, chairman of LongJump, said customers are using the platform for everything from doctor's office scheduling and dental practice management solutions to GPS location vehicle tracking and Human Resource applications.

gCloud3, a Las Vegas based startup, turned a lot of solution provider heads with its turnkey private cloud solution. Michael Fraser, director of gCloud3, said he sees a breakthrough sales year for his new company in 2010.

Even one of the industry pioneers, Novell, has moved quickly with a full fledged product line to support solution providers bringing cloud solutions to the market. In fact, Dan Dufault, global director of partner marketing, for Novell, called Novell an "arms dealer" for the cloud computing revolyution that is reshaping the market.

The most striking message from all the experts on the cloud panel was that those solution providers that don't make the move will find themselves marginalized or out of business. There's a cloud burst of activity out there. And if you don't get with the program you are going to find yourself in a rain storm without an umbrella.

Solution providers say this is personal for both HP CEO Mark Hurd and Cisco CEO John Chambers. And its personal for HP and Cisco's direct sales reps working with partners on account strategy and planning. That means partners that refuse to choose to line up 100 percent behind one or the other are going to face recrimination and payback in the form of favored or unfavored treatment. Not good news particularly in -- to put it mildly -- a difficult information technology spending environment.

Partners say they are already feeling the heat to choose one or the other in the wake of Cisco's all-out push to grab HP blade server share with the Cisco Unified Computing System and HP's all out assault to grab networking share with the HP ProCurve networking portfolio. But the 3Com deal takes it to a nuclear war level. In a post on ChannelWeb Connect, one solution provider complained: "I wish these two could just play nice together (HP/Cisco)," he said. "They each do things well and forcing partners to choose one or the other is not smart, but I can already see this coming."

Dave Donatelli, HP's executive vice president and general manager, enterprise servers and networking, is lining up his sales force, and that includes partners, to take down Cisco. And he is not going to stand for any flip-flopping from HP partners looking to cross over into Cisco territory.

For those of you that don't know Donatelli, he comes from the EMC School of hard sales knocks. Donatelli spent 22 years at EMC where he headed up a team of Boston College ex-athletes-turned-sales-pros who thrived on giving competitors a sales beating like they had never seen in their lives. Yes, Donatelli is a BC graduate and so is his new handpicked head of sales in the U.S., Randy Seidl.

To put it simply, HP is turning from a sales lamb into a sales lion. "HP has a new 'take no prisoners' attitude," said one top solution provider executive who does significant HP and Cisco business. "The HP sales force was kind of passive before. Now they are, like the Cisco sales force, very, very aggressive."

The top solution provider executive said he sees both HP and Cisco putting the heat on partners to line up on one side or the other. "We should not be lined up by vendors, but by the unique needs of our customers," he said. "That is who we serve. We have to embrace the notion that our bread is provided by our customers."

Partners' bread may be buttered by customers. But believe me, both HP and Cisco believe they butter the partners' bread -- not the customers. "My concern is what do we do if one of them tries to withdraw or pull big amounts of support from us," said the solution provider executive. "How do we sustain our business? Because we've got to be multivendor. The efficiency of the channel is based on a multivendor model."

The need to choose sides is likely to be felt more by midmarket enterprise solution providers rather than product-oriented giants like CDW.

"This is personal between Hurd and Chambers," added the solution provider executive. "They are very competitive people and they have decided they are going to go at it. It may be rooted in some good business practices, but it is two egos going at it." And solution providers that aren't careful are likely to be stepped on in that bruising battle between the two.

It also meant he was under Hurd's constant scrutiny, being pushed and prodded every step of the way to make sure the channel was delivering.

HP has promoted Jones to a new post effective Nov. 1 running HP's Enterprise Storage and Servers business in Asia-Pacific and Japan. It's a well-deserved promotion for Jones, whose close working relationship with Hurd paved the way for a dramatic increase in the number of joint sales calls that Hurd and other HP executives made with HP partners. Through the first six months of 2009, Hurd and other top-level HP executives met with more than 300 customers and 100 solution providers, according to Jones. My challenge to vendors is to answer this question: How many joint sales calls have your CEO and top executives made with partners this year? My bet is that challenge is met by nothing but the sound of crickets.

The fact is that Hurd is the most channel-engaged CEO in this business. There are few executives that have his unique mix of sales and operations experience. No other company has as big and as broad a technology portfolio and channel. And no other IT company has as bright a future for sales growth.

That's because no other company has invested as much in driving channel growth. At a time when competitors are cutting channel spend, Hurd is spending more than ever. That's because he wants more sales coverage, not less. He is the only top executive among the major computer makers that talks about his company not having enough sales coverage.

Hurd understands channel economics and is drilling down into every nook and cranny of channel spend. He wants to make sure he is getting the maximum return on every sales touch. That's why he is pushing channel leadership directly into the business units. That will likely mean even more dramatic increases in joint sales calls between HP executives and its partners.

Having a tight relationship with Hurd is no picnic. Hurd was constantly pushing Jones on increasing channel sales, cutting costs and getting partners to sell the full HP product portfolio. Of all the channel chiefs in this business, my bet is no one was more aggressively challenged by his CEO than Jones.

HP's biggest challenge in pushing channel responsibility directly into the business units is that the channel chiefs in those units don't have that tight working relationship with Hurd. That ability to stay deeply connected to the channel is something Hurd should be careful he does not lose as HP gives its business units more channel autonomy.

No channel chief can be successful without the strong support of the CEO. Jones had that tight relationship with Hurd. Will Jones' replacement and the business unit channel leaders be able to say the same? HP's channel future depends on it.

Partners need to know if they are quoting a customer a price on a product -- even a single unit price -- that is in line with what the vendor is offering either on its own Web site or from a direct-sales rep.

One of the eye-opening moments from our recent XChange '09 conference was a solution provider complaining that Dell Direct is, in some cases, quoting prices that are 10 percent to 15 percent below the channel price on low-quantity servers or PCs.

"Our customer relationship is undermined by Dell based on the fact that when we do a [price] quote based on what we are getting, the customer then calls to check pricing and they are oftentimes getting 10 to 15 points better pricing than we are being given," said Leo Bletnitsky, president of Desktop Valet, a Las Vegas-based solution provider, during a question-and-answer session with Dell Worldwide Channel Chief Greg Davis. "So that spread becomes gouging in the customer's eyes."

That pricing spread, in fact, is keeping this partner from even quoting the price of Dell products.

Davis, who has received high marks for his willingness to address channel issues head-on, admitted that channel pricing parity is an issue for Dell on its mainstream hardware business. He said Dell is attempting to implement the same kind of pricing model it has used to great success with its EqualLogic business.

It's no surprise that this was a business Dell bought 19 months ago for $1.4 billion. That investment has paid off handsomely because Dell has done such a good job of maintaining EqualLogic's channel momentum. Channel partners, in fact, give Dell credit for not undercutting them.

"The pricing and the way that we have our storage product line set up is working very well," said Davis. "I never have an issue or a complaint with respect to storage because of the way we set it up. We are working to get that same process into our server product line and hopefully through the rest of the product line."

What the Dell case shows is just how difficult it is for a longtime direct-sales company to transform itself into a channel company. All the processes and policies that Dell has built since its inception 25 years ago were built to support a direct-sales model. Now Dell is changing that direct-sales DNA to make way for a channel model. It is not something that can be done overnight. It's a journey.

On the plus side, give Dell credit for improving its Annual Report Card scores, Everything Channel's annual report in which solution providers rate vendors in a range of categories. If Dell wants to continue to see its ARC scores improve, though, it needs to get this channel pricing issue resolved.

To that point, Best Buy has always had trouble providing technology services to consumers, businesses or any class of customers. That's why the local solution provider channel has thrived from its inception in the early '80s. And it's why there will always be a place for the local solution provider.

With technology product sales plummeting, the retail giant is making a big push on services. In fact, Best Buy's new CEO, Brian Dunn, sees services as the future for the company. In the most recent quarter, Best Buy's comparable domestic store sales were down 4.9 percent due to what the retailer called a decline in customer traffic. Interestingly enough, the sales decline was partially offset by what Best Buy called gains in notebook computers, mobile phones and repair services.

So are Best Buy's Geek Squad techs being pressured into making repairs that are flat out just not necessary? It's a question worth asking given the experience of one of our esteemed editors, Scott Campbell, and a number of other consumers complaining about the Geek Squad. To get the full impact of the services shenanigans, go to Campbell's blog post on our ChannelWeb Connect community at community.crn.com. Here is a short summary:

Campbell's wife bought him a $700 Dell laptop in January for his birthday. She also decided to go the extra mile (better safe than sorry) and buy the Best Buy three-year, $300 "Black Tie Protection" warranty. How much margin, by the way, does Best Buy make on this "Black Tie Protection" warranty plan? My bet is it's a lot more margin than it is making on the Dell laptop.

The Black Tie black eye for the Campbell family came after only five months when the hinge on the Dell laptop came loose. Campbell brought his Dell laptop back to Best Buy, which agreed to ship it out and return it to him in three weeks. How in the world can you justify a warranty that does not provide a one- or two-day turnaround in this day and age? Three weeks. Are you kidding me? What exactly are you paying for if you can't get a repair done in 48 hours?

We've already proven that the $300 Best Buy "Black Tie" warranty isn't exactly a barnburner. Then Best Buy's Geek Squad replaced the hard drive without so much as even a heads up to Campbell. To top it all off, Campbell proceeds to get a phone call from another Geek Squad rocket scientist asking if he wants to buy data recovery services from Best Buy.

There is no way any local solution provider could provide this kind of service and last more than a month.

From this vantage point, it looks like there is a lot more bad business than best buys at Best Buy. And it's that bad business that is sure to lead more customers from Best Buy to solution providers.