'IBM is very serious when it comes to growth in cloud', says Vamsicharan Mudiam of IBM

IBM recently announced a new cloud marketplace which will serve as a cloud innovation hub where technology meets business with hundreds of cloud services from IBM, partners and third party ecosystem. Vamsicharan Mudiam, Country Manager, Cloud Solutions, IBM India-South Asia tells DQ Channels about the new cloud e-commerce, partners benefit and new trends in partner ecosystem with cloud computing

Why the cloud marketplace by IBM?
There were some major areas which IBM wanted to address for enterprise cloud customers. Firstly, we wanted to see if the customers have a single point layer in trying and buying services from IBM and its partners cutting across infrastructure software and business process services. The main purpose of the marketplace is to get the best of the cloud to the customer. Secondly, it gives us an ability to address the key consumption model of three sets of cloud consumers. If you look at cloud based services there are largely three categories of people who are buying. Firstly, there are lines of business users who are less interested in which machine it is running but more in what features a particular SAAS service has and how it could be used for the company's business functioning. The second sets of people are those who are looking at development. And the third sets are operation guys who are inquisitive about the backend process of the cloud service. Our mission is to cater to largely these three categories of people who can directly access IBM services. And the third most important aspect is that now our partners have the ability to leverage the same market which is maintained by IBM for selling our own products and even their products also as long as it is running on IBM cloud. An eligible partner whose service is running on IBM cloud can actually sell it to the same audience that we are selling to.

Can you explain on the partners benefit and how they can leverage the cloud marketplace.
If you go to the IBM marketplace there is a section called the ‘Vendor Guide' where it basically talks about what are the basic requirements for any partner to be eligible to put a service. The partner solution should be something which can run on Softlayer and it could also have the ability to be integrated with our Bluemix platform. It should also be available on production for free trial and have customer support too.

What are your cloud offerings in India?
Softlayer is a very big investment, initiative and building block for cloud service for IBM. We are having 25 to 40 datacenters dedicated to Softlayer in India. That is important from customer, partner and regulation perspective. There are 100-plus SAAS offerings which IBM has. The acquisitions made by IBM over the last couple of years has been on buying companies which are either pure SAAS or has some amount of SAAS flavour to their offerings. Again the SAAS offerings are very LOP specific and if you go to the marketplace you will also have role-based SAAS solutions. We also have a lot of infrastructure related offerings which we sell. We have a datacentre in India on which a customer can buy disaster recovery (DR) services. Wherein customer will pay per server per month for the DR he needs and the entire DR including infrastructure replication software is taken care of by IBM. Rather than setting up dedicated DR infrastructures cloud can give them the cost advantage and also the nimbleness which is required to put up a DR site.

How is Softlayer helping IBM when it comes to its cloud offering in India?
On two parts Softlayer becomes a very important building block for cloud offering. Firstly, where our traditional enterprise is looking at non-critical workloads and new workloads move onto cloud based platform and a huge number of startups, and ISVs who are looking at Softlayer as IAAS. Secondly, once the marketplace enhances and partners start contributing then our addressable market opportunity becomes bigger as now we have Softlayer based infrastructure helping partners and IBM SAAS offering deliver SAAS to our customers as they go into SAAS-based consumption business processes. So Softlayer becomes a central pin around which a lot of other pins run. India is a land of developers too and with our Bluemix running on Softlayer we hope to open the doors for innovation for developers of both enterprises and entrepreneurs.

What is a partner's role in Softlayer?
Channels are very important when it comes to Softlayer. We have largely two types of channel programs namely the Referral channel program, where a channel who is not necessarily interested in doing cloud business but comes across as an opportunity where Softlayer can make sense to their end-customers so you can refer that customer to IBM and get a referral bonus for it. The referral bonus starts at about 10 percent for first year and goes to 8-6 percent as the customer uses the platform. The second is the Reseller program where partners can buy from us and sell it in whatever mode they fit right. Some may buy and sell it as infrastructure, while others will put managed services around it and sell it as back up-as-service to his customer. There are value-added resellers and partners and ISVs. We have made it easy for referring and also reselling Softlayer. Infact in the reseller model it is almost like white-labelling without getting your own logo. The partner is given the complete freedom in doing what he intends after buying IBM Softlayer service.

How do you plan to grow with Softlayer and other cloud offerings in India?
We have made the right noises till now. We have been selling cloud before Softlayer and now with its acquisition it gives us a boost in the arm. It now ensures that we have something running inside the country and our addressability to the market. We will also be in the regulated industries where the data needs to be in the country. And with Bluemix we will basically focus on the developer's cloud in India. Statically if you look at it a lot more new age applications are coming on the cloud based model and I am we are sure that developers will be focusing on that to develop on cloud. And lastly, we will grow with our SAAS offerings, where we will increase our portfolio. We will address the shift in customer buying pattern and meet new customer base by offering SAAS. IBM is very serious when it comes to growth in cloud and we are doing the right things to ensure that we have the huge amount of growth in the local market place.

How are you encouraging channel partners to look into the cloud future?
Vamsicharan: Much before any of these started we had program where partners were divided into three segments. One belonged to the cloud builder segments; the second are cloud aggregators, who are ISVs, MSBs, and resellers. They aggregate the demand for public cloud services. And the third are cloud technology partners. They give technology pieces to make IBM's cloud better either by adding security elements or mobile solution and etc. The first are our traditional bread and butter, and the second are where we are making these models for partners to quickly embrace Softlayer and its offerings enabling them to get into their customer's cloud aspirations. We are focused in going after new type of partners in content providing, and cloud consultants who are making money by just doing services around cloud infrastructures.

What is the emerging partner trend you see with the advent of cloud computing?
By virtue of cloud being available in e-commerce format the role of traditional partners of warehousing or stock and sale is changing. You cannot change the partner relationship with the end customers apart from all the things that they are doing in terms of logistics around delivering the equipment or software to the end customer. As almost every customer is looking at cloud, so for a partner to be relevant he has to start selling cloud also. Again these people are not the traditional ones who came up selling laptops and servers but these are people who are more into helping customers get onto the cloud. So the biggest gap between the demand and the supply is going to be the drag which is needed for the guy who is demanding something to be run on the cloud from the supply side. There is some which IBM will do directly for the traditional and large enterprise. But there are huge numbers out there who needs to be migrated onto cloud and there partners will play an important role. So for example, by buying storage on Softlayer from us the partner can provide back-up business service, or managed services, and migration services also. They can also bring in their own network of ISV partners and get them onto Softlayer and deliver it to their customers. That is how the traditional partners are changing and aligning to that model. And the new partners, who have no legacy in terms of old partner model, are actually coming in delivering to their customers too.