Focus on the future

In a similar vein Bova sees this process mirrored in the traditional channels with solution providers and systems integrators seeking partners, service providers and contractors amongst themselves to that the channel itself becomes more stratified.

By end 2010, 70 percent of mid-size VARs will generate at least 50 percent of their revenue by selling to, through, and with other VARs, SIs, ISVs and service providers, predicted Gartner.

This quirky change in channel relationships will at least in part come about because of one of the headline solutions trends the industry is embarking upon – Software as a Service (SaaS).

SaaS and even Hardware as a Service (HaaS) is still in “trigger phase” claimed Baty, but it will continue to grow and will in turn spur growth in business process outsourcing with each accelerating as the two solutions leverage each other.

Part of a range of emerging delivery models, SaaS is causing this change in channel relationships as large IT vendors try to decipher what role partners will play in the delivery value chain and what types of partners they need to hopefully maintain a balance between the traditional resale model and the “as a Service” model.

One of the dangers large vendors face in the emergence of this new delivery model is that they are not necessarily at the centre of the ecosystem that provides solutions to end-users. The proliferation of open source solutions and interactive web solutions such as Saleforce.com have begun to dilute their power. This trend is accelerating as ecosystems are growing around such point solutions either by design or by market demand and increasingly the delivery of a solution can be about bringing together point solutions from a series of smaller suppliers rather than the large monolithic application developers of yesterday’s data centre.