CLOUD / SOFTWARE
provider’s infrastructure. An organisation
can develop and deploy custom cloud
applications without needing to invest in
hardware or development tools. Likewise,
an organisation can use PaaS to extend or
re-architect their existing applications in the
cloud.
Examples of platform-as-a-service are
AWS Lambda, Microsoft Azure PaaS,
Google App Engine, Apache Stratos, and
Force.com, which is a development platform
for Salesforce customers.
PaaS o ers a number of advantages over
on-premises development, including:
• Low infrastructure and development costs.
• Built-in application development tools and
support.
• Rapid time-to-deployment.
• On-demand, scalable resources.
e delivery model of PaaS is similar
to SaaS, except instead of delivering the
software over the internet, PaaS provides a
platform for software creation. is platform
is delivered via the web, giving developers
the freedom to concentrate on building the
software without having to worry about
operating systems, software updates, storage,
or infrastructure.
IaaS: Infrastructure as a Service
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is an instant
computing infrastructure, provisioned and
managed over the internet. It’s one of the
three types of cloud services, along with
software as a service (SaaS), platform as a
service (PaaS).
According to Microsoft, IaaS quickly
scales up and down with demand, letting
you pay only for what you use. It helps you
avoid the expense and complexity of buying
and managing your own physical servers
and other data centre infrastructure. Each
resource is o ered as a separate service
component, and users only need to rent a
particular one for as long as they need it. A
cloud computing service provider, such as
Azure, manages the infrastructure, while
you purchase, install, con gure, and manage
your own software—operating systems,
middleware, and applications.
Typical applications include
• Test and development. Teams can quickly
set up and dismantle test and development
environments, bringing new applications
to market faster. IaaS makes scaling devtest
environments up and down quick and
economical.
• Website hosting. Running websites using
IaaS can be less expensive than traditional
web hosting.
User and provider responsibilities for the three di erent cloud types.
• Storage, backup and recovery.
Organisations avoid the capital outlay
for storage and complexity of storage
management, which typically requires
skilled sta to manage data and meet
legal and compliance requirements. IaaS
is useful for handling unpredictable
demand and steadily growing storage
needs. It can also simplify the planning
and management of backup and recovery
systems.
• Web apps. IaaS provides all the
infrastructure to support web apps,
including storage, web and application
servers, and networking resources.
Organisations can quickly deploy web
apps on IaaS and easily scale infrastructure
up and down when demand for the apps is
unpredictable.
• Big data analysis. Big data is a popular
term for massive data sets that contain
potentially valuable patterns, trends and
associations. Mining data sets to locate or
tease out these hidden patterns requires a
huge amount of processing power; which
IaaS provides economically.
Reseller Engagement
By far the greatest involvement with resellers
in these three modes of cloud computing
is SaaS. e reasons for this are obvious in
that the vast majority of resellers are smaller
companies that sell directly to an SME base.
As such these resellers want to sell ‘oven
ready’ products and applications; products
that are well de ned and packaged ready for
use. If you look at the comparison matrix you
will see that most resellers do not have the
skills to orchestrate the services that are in
the user managed sections.
So how can resellers compete in this SaaS
market? In short, it’s very di cult and much
of the smaller reseller success stems for the
fact that larger resellers do not operate at the
lower level themselves.
ereon in, smaller resellers have great
relationships with their customers; they are
renowned for being responsive to their clients
and nimble at delivering solutions all of
which are attributes that are not likely to go
out of fashion any time soon.
However, SaaS is a very crowded market
– not only do customers need to be found
but they also need to be retained. As a
result, SaaS companies and their resellers
are searching for ways to make their
product ‘stickier’ with customers, decreasing
customer churn to secure more revenue over
an extended period, and reducing the burden
of integration with an ever-growing range of
applications.
Here the reseller still has plenty
of ammunition to re in the form of
bundled services solutions, other forms of
di erentiation and by providing customer
service excellence.
Carl Boraman, Director of Strategic
Alliances at Tollring says there is clear bene t
for the owners of reseller organisations to
sell software on a recurring revenue basis
as it provides stability and can signi cantly
increase the value of their business when
planning to exit.
“However, everything in their
business has to adapt to selling SaaS. e
key questions to face are, how do you
di erentiate your o ering, and how do you
fund your business?”
16 | Channel Profi les 2020 2019 www.commsbusiness.co.uk
uk
/Force.com
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