By Priyanka Bhattacharya

Sunil Golani, Director, Technology & Solution Practices, Avnet Technology Solutions India talks to Channeltimes on how channel partners are looking at the cloud computing market, and Avnet’s initiative CloudReady program.

How prepared do you think are the Indian channel community in selling cloud solutions?
We believe the Indian channel community is now getting ready to address sales in the cloud computing space. Given the haziness that exists in this area, channel partners may yet be figuring out the right strategy to adopt.

Avnet Technology Solutions, India launched the Avnet CloudReady Program initiative precisely to empower our channel partners. Our CloudReady team will assist and educate our channel partners on market dynamics, enhance their cloud computing capabilities and help them create strategies to capture opportunities, which right now are massive.

While areas like Public cloud may appear straightforward and present a reselling opportunity, Solutions for the Private Cloud will involve fair amount of complexities and will require different skills and approach.

The cloud market is still nascent in India, why do you think it makes sense for channel partners to move into this segment now?

I think the time is right for our channel partners to gear up and begin to address this high potential market.

Enterprise customers seem to be formulating their cloud adoption strategies while others are waiting to start using them on the Public cloud. Virtualization, as we are aware, has now penetrated quite deeply in to organizations and has provided the required foundation for clouds already. Channel partners can now offer their support to customers in arriving at the right strategies for cloud adoption and also play a part in delivering them.

How can channel partners ease into this business segment while making most of their existing business?
Avnet CloudReady aims to do exactly this. It focuses mainly on building private clouds where existing products such as Computing, Storage, Virtualization, Software etc. are delivered to customers as they build private clouds – stage to stage. Many VARs and System Integrators offer virtualization solutions which itself is a building block for the cloud.

Give us more details on the CloudReady program from Avnet?
Avnet CloudReady is a technology focused program that is designed for our channel partners to become successful with cloud computing. It is based on Avnet’s Solutions Path methodology that allows partners to Envision, Enable and Execute on the opportunity.

With CloudReady, partners can provide solutions under Public, Private and Hybrid Cloud to their customers. CloudReady is a structured program that focuses on delivering highly effective and profitable cloud solutions that bring measurable results for our partners and end customers. Key highlights include training, cloud services, pre sales expertise and a cloud maturity model to enable consistent execution.

What products and solutions will be under this program?
Avnet CloudReady has products and solutions such as IaaS (infrastructure as a service), PaaS (platform as a service) in the Public Cloud category while on the Private Cloud we will offer end-to-end solutions including Servers, Storage, Virtualization and most importantly the Management Software that helps build the Cloud Platforms.

With private clouds being most preferred amongst customers today, how are you training your partners to sell the concept of public and hybrid cloud to customers? Which of the cloud formats is most profitable for the partners to sell today?
We are providing lot of emphasis on training and enablement as these are new concepts and computing models that are evolving. We have plans to conduct partner boot-camps with focus on education, sales orientation and value based selling. We will provide tools and resources necessary for our channel partners to enter and grow profitably in the cloud computing market.

How is Avnet positioned to ride the growth of the cloud in India? What kind of growth you are expecting from this business this year? Avnet has been working deeply in the Virtualization domain for many years now and has a well established practice in India. This provides a very good foundation to advance in to the cloud market. In addition, technology alliances with IBM, HP, VMware, Citrix, etc gives us the desired impetus to move ahead and ride the cloud growth in India. With this program in place, our objectives are more on building the eco-system, providing the required enablement and plan support to our suppliers and channel partners for a successful cloud solutions practice