Cloud Software Association

It’s been many years. some key milestones are in https://www.linkedin.com/in/maxkuzkin/ …

I was part of the team that created Parallels Desktop years ago – parallels.com. When that product was well established we were building other things, like apsstandard.org, for example, which was implemented in products like https://www.cloudblue.com/odin/ which was acquired by Ingram Micro few years ago (https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/news/ingram-micro-acquires-odin-service-automation-platform-from-parallels/); thus here I am at Ingram Micro now.

Funny enough my biggest personal learning was that the cloud didn’t really disrupt the channel, but made lives of many MSPs and VARs much simpler.

The reason I’m saying that is that years ago I was under impression that “OK – here comes the cloud and all services will be so easy to find and consume there will be no need for any channel help”.

But the reality turned out much funnier. There are so many cloud services now doing so many things and with so great complexity. Poor SMB and business owners are not able to figure it all out without someone’s help.

Hence, the need for the channel has only increased ever since.

It’s a fundamental nature of physics (truly) that software will grow in infinite complexity, and thus there can never be a sustainable self-service free market for software.

We can always keep coding. It’s the tower of babel.

Agree – though was rally not obvious to me some 10 years ago. That’s why the whole Ingram Micro story was a true revelation to my brain.

IT teams largely don’t care where to buy from. It’s a matter of value and convenience. If it’s simpler and more convenient to buy from vendor directly, they would, of course.

But keep in mind that distributers add lots of different things – credit terms alone could be a huge differentiator. If you can pay after the deal is closed vs now => would you choose to go direct with the vendor? Then comes financial aspect of the story. Accounts payable’s relationship with many vendors is costly to maintain too. Vendors often don’t have good capabilities around that. And then comes unified reporting, API etc.

Yup. So we’re looking at Ingram precisely for that reason. Providing net terms and alternate payment methods and collections

So, ironically, there is less incentive to buy Office 365 through distribution because their portals are much more advanced. For smaller and less popular products, going through distribution is often much more compelling than for Office 365.

That is often true, actually. Everyone is coin-driven. And coin-driven is very good from my point of view. Sales reps in many organizations still have little incentive to sell subscription services because even with 3 years prepaid it doesn’t generate enough %% for their bonus. Unfortunately, there is no technical solution around this, obviously. And we see more and more businesses changing compensation structure for their sales to accommodate for subscriptions reality.

When that happens, for example, by attaching recurring revenue to the sales rep account, this helps a lot with the motivation, as you can imagine.

Greatly depends on the vertical: Telco is different from MSP/VAR and not the same as Retail. For MSP/VAR the trend I see is negotiation of the yearly budget with the customer; hence the desire to pass-through yearly terms down the chain, cause this is the way contract is negotiated with the end-customer. For Telco dynamics are different and their goals are around attach-ratio to their monthly contracts. Retailers have different problems of their own too – depends on the partner. A lot of that has to do with what risks are being managed by purchasing a service package from the partner.

MSPs I understand. You’re effectively controlling the head count cost of IT. Telco I’m not sure I get; I think it’s about selling complete communications solutions (telephone + call center software?), but I don’t have enough experience.

Telco are all fighting for additional services attached per seat: antivirus, communication, backup – whatever, yes.

I hate it when companies sell to meet their own internal needs rather than end customer value.

It’s one of the largest areas of growth and opportunity for them these days with all regulation happening in the industry.

Ah, regulatory capture? What’s happening there?

https://www.ft.com/content/68ee5cb6-5106-11e7-bfb8-997009366969 and similar processes happening around the globe over recent years making the communication service itself more and more a commodity.

Interesting. I don’t understand what the end customer gets from buying from a telco besides arbitrage.

It’s often much simpler. I’m buying my Netflix through T-mobile, for example.

Why?

Was 1 click and like 5% cheaper than going direct

Aye. Arbitrage

Why bothering going to Netflix and registering and all that?

It makes sense to me. A Late Majority playbook. Perfectly important. I was wondering if there was more to it.

Supply chain is a well developed area and fulfillment is definitely part of it but not the most complex one. 4 of the most important supply flows are highlighted in the diagram and each is a value in itself:

1. Contracts Flow – distributor helps with standardized paperwork and onboarding of Vendors to the common denominator. It might take many months for anyone to onboard each vendor contractually, while work with the distributor requires just 1 contract.

2. Product Information Flow – we work with our partners to provide them with go-to-market and other activities to the level of integration into their systems and business processes.

3. Fulfillment – this one is well known and developed, so won’t stop too much on it.

4. Usage/Consumption Flows – aggregation of data and extraction for billing in other systems is a very complex beast as well on top of that – integrations, business processes all over the place.

Fulfillment is valuable but not alone and I didn’t even mention financials, AR/AP, reconciliation and all of that – not to overcomplicate the story

Yes we’re thinking of opening up Connect documentation indeed. As of now it’s only available for those who works in the portal. Thus limits ability to learn/align on the reference architecture… As of today i can recommend you to shoot a message to Huang, Anthony <> Anthony is Product Manager in my organization and he’ll be able to do a demo of Connect for you and a trial account so you can do your research.