Jan 4 2013   3:51PM GMT

How do you make money with cloud-related services? Some suggestions

Posted by: Heather Clancy
Channel, cloud computing services

Reading up on some cloud channel adoption trends, based on a report published in late 2012 by consulting firm PartnerPath.

Since the cloud continues to arise perennially as one of the biggest business development challenges for technology solution providers, I wasn’t really surprised to read that more than half of the ones who responded to a recent PartnerPath survey still derive less than 10 percent of their revenue from cloud services.

Only 20 percent (or so) of the respondents indicated that they generate more than 20 percent of their revenue from cloud services.

That was the case even though nearly 60 percent characterized themselves as resellers or agents of either SaaS business productivity applications (Google, Office365, Webex or Netsuite) or some sort of cloud infrastructure service (usually some sort of disaster recovery or backup solution).

AND that another 40 percent of the survey respondents are actually building some sort of cloud solution themselves or managing private and hybrid cloud environments on behalf of their customers.

PartnerPath writes in its analysis:

“We expected this to be a higher percentage of the total, given the industry’s focus on private cloud implementations as the first step in the journey to the cloud. The function of ‘system integration’ was ranked highest by respondents across the board above reselling, agent/influencing, developing applications or acting as a service provider. These organizations provider systems integration services tied most frequently to virtualization of servers and storage, but also to private cloud architectures.”

Doubtless, this has something to do with where the money is to be made.

Here are the top cloud services mentioned by the PartnerPath survey respondents, ranked in terms of current profit potential. (The percentage figure is the number of solution providers that ranked the solution among their most profitable cloud services today):

• Virtualized servers (63 percent)
• Cloud file backup (48 percent)
• Private cloud design services (35 percent)
• Virtualized storage (28 percent)
• Business productivity applications (24 percent)