3 Tech Disrupters On What's Keeping Partners From Finding Cloud Success

The Biggest Obstacle

During a recent discussion with cloud vendors at the CRN Disrupters roundtable, the conversation turned to the obstacles facing vendors and solution providers that are aiming to work together to sell cloud solutions. According to vendor executives, the challenge of education is at the top of the list.

The three companies represented were Concerto Cloud Services, a provider of solutions for public, private and hybrid cloud initiatives that's based in Tampa, Fla.; LogicMonitor, which offers a software-as-a-service performance monitoring platform and is based in Santa Barbara, Calif.; and Star2Star Communications, a provider of hybrid cloud communications solutions that's headquartered in Sarasota, Fla.

Top executives from the three companies--Concerto President Steve Terp, LogicMonitor CEO Kevin McGibben and Star2Star President Gary Testa--spoke with CRN during the recent XChange 2016 conference in San Antonio, hosted by CRN parent The Channel Company. What follows are their thoughts on cloud education and the channel.

CRN: What's the biggest obstacle that is holding back some solution providers from finding success in the cloud?

Gary Testa, Star2Star Communications

It's education. The solutions we are delivering are complex. You have a group of intelligent people often times who already believe they know what they are selling, or have got a set mode, and to break that is really, in my mind, the most difficult. We face that challenge because oftentimes, with our competitors, it's hard to do an apples-to-apples comparison to us because of our hybrid nature. We spend a great deal of time on education.

Kevin McGibben, LogicMonitor

I would echo your comments. I think education is first and foremost, in fact as it takes different forms--whether it's the teams in the partner that need to either be hired or be trained, and become knowledgeable about the solution that we provide. And not only how it's different, but how they deploy it, and how they manage it. We are actually, I would say, in an active mode of enabling our channel partner strategy … This has been a super-fast dive for us the last few years, where this partner business has taken off like a rocket, and continues to. We are really putting a lot of investment in time and people into it now in terms of educating, being able to bring on channel partner managers, and putting some real investment behind the programs.

Steve Terp, Concerto Cloud Services

For us [education is] always at the top. The partner has to believe this [is] a priority and that it's going to change the way they do business. If we can start there, then that can trickle down. Sometimes we'll sign a partner, and the partner, they'll just move really slow. I joke with our channel managers, I say you are priority five for this guy right now, you're never going to get to priority two or three. So we've got to get to those leaders, and they've got to decide in order to compete, and in order to maintain their customer relationships, to grow the customer relationships, to get recurring revenue--they have to change things. That means paying more attention to it, that means allowing us to go through all the enablement steps in the partner care

CRN: Why is it so challenging to provide the right level of education to the channel?

Kevin McGibben, LogicMonitor

This renaissance of ... the channel business—even though the technologies are different, the solutions deployed are different--I think that because the partners have such well-established business and relationships, we still have to fold into that environment really well. So that means training, product training, technical sales training, certification, support. We still have to provide them that toolset that they are used to, so that it fits into their business model well enough, so that that sticks for the long-term. So I would say those are the key elements that we are putting time and effort into these days, to overcome those challenges.

Gary Testa, Star2Star Communications

It's easily I would say the largest barrier that we have to growing faster, just bringing people up to speed better on that technology, and also making sure that they set expectations with the end users properly. I don't know about you, but the worst situations you go into are where a great partner has oversold what you are capable of, and then you spend a great deal of time cleaning it up … [The ideal is] not where the partner sells, it's where we sell together. It's where they bring us in to act as the expert--those are the really successful deals. They close faster, you set expectations correctly. And implementation goes much smoother as well.

Steve Terp, Concerto Cloud Services

There [are] so many new things to try, and so many new tools, and so many [cloud] providers out there that people get this mix and match that in the end doesn't serve the customer well. And so the aggressive MSPs, the aggressive integrators are going to those customers and saying, ’Let's take it all and show you how we're going to do this, let's show you how we're going to monitor it, let's show you how we're going to report on it, let's show you what we're going to do around an