The inability of some cloud providers to turn a profit should provide lessons for service providers looking to enter the data centre services market, according to Steve Brazier of research firm Canalys.
Brazier told an audience of data centre professionals at Schneider Electric's APC Summit in Sydney yesterday that they should look to other players for infrastructure, rather than risk their own capital.
"You need to be very careful about taking any capital risk yourself. Get the vendors to do it, get the telcos to do it, get the customer to do it – be very careful about doing it yourselves. You can be the one who aggregates these services and helps the customer navigate this minefield."
Brazier singled out recent developments like Ciscos's announcement of plans to build a cloud platform with Telstra as the way forward for channel partners.
"This is fantastic news for you the partners," he said. "The [Cisco] intercloud strategy is perfect for you. You can take no risk… Cisco will guarantee the quality."
Lessons can be learned by anyone looking to enter the data centre services market by looking at the inability of some cloud providers to turn a profit, he argued.
"We don't know of one public cloud provider, in the world, running their own data centres, who is profitable," he said. "Nobody that we know of has made money from this revolution."
The comments come as prices continue to tumble for high profile cloud services, with Amazon, Microsoft and Google all announcing a new round of major price drops.
CRN spoke to one of the country's top resellers, Data#3 chief executive John Grant, at its JuiceIT conference this week, where he quizzed the commercial model of cloud providers in their "landgrab" for market share.
"Amazon doesn't make any money. Salesforce doesn't make any money. These are the biggest cloud providers anywhere. It is a race to the bottom," said Grant.
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