Normally, the assimilation of one product category into another is cause for dismay in the channel. But as we go forward, Adam Famularo, CA , senior vice president and general manager for CA’s Recovery Management & Data Modeling business unit, points out that what we’re actually witnessing is the transformation of backup and recovery into an ongoing service that creates opportunities for recurring revenue streams for channel partners.

Famularo adds that this general movement towards backup and recovery in the cloud is also creating some even bigger opportunities for solution provider in the realm of data management. Customers no longer want to treat all data equally. They want to be able to prioritize the recovery process based on relative importance of the data. That creates an opportunity for solution providers to deliver information lifecycle management (ILM) services to the customers are that are enabled by data deduplication and replication services tied back to cloud computing services.

Famularo says channel partners should keep an eye out for how CA not only intends to tightly integrate backup and recovery with cloud computing services, but also how the entire portfolio of CA products will be unified around a data management strategy.

In the meantime, Famularo says he wants partners to know that CA is serious about backup and recovery because it’s now part of a larger corporate strategy that will ultimately create more opportunities for partners.

But at the same time, interest in increasing the productivity of the existing workforce through the better use of IT is on the rise. The question is how can solution providers best leverage unified communications to meet the needs of customers while simultaneously advancing their own business goals? The answer to that question is to start thinking more like a carrier that is delivering set of services that have been customized for a specific customer.

We all know that every major carrier is looking to expand their footprint in unified communications. But the issue these big carriers will have over time is their inability to customize these services. As unified communications evolve in the enterprise, customers are going to want to see these services delivered inside the applications they use every day. That creates an opportunity for solution providers to provide custom unified communication services as a managed service to the customer.

To pull that off, however, solution providers are going to need to deploy a suite of products based in industry standards such as the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) that by definition creates an open architecture. For example, it’s the maturity of SIP that enabled Siemens to replace Tandberg with Polycom as its preferred partner for the video conferencing component of the OpenScape unified communications platform. That same approach has also allowed Siemens to make a case for layering its software in on top of existing Nortel infrastructure rather than just assuming those customers will become customers of Avaya in the wake of the latter company buying the enteprise assets of Nortel, said Michael Garland, head of the North America channel for Siemens Enterprise Networks.

As time goes on, SIP will be extended to integrate with a host of service-oriented architecture (SOA) services, as promised this week separately by Avaya and IBM, that will allow unified communications to be delivered seamlessly across public and private cloud computing implementations.

In the meantime, unified communications represents one of the best opportunities for solution providers to inset themselves inside the business processes of their customers. And as we’ve said before, whoever controls the business process controls the customer.

For example, a lot of existing applications are not designed to run as a service in the cloud. And yet customers will typically have 20 years of business logic tied up in that application, so rewriting that application just so it can be delivered as a service via the cloud may not make a whole lot of sense. In addition, there are certain core applications that differentiate the business from business, so running those applications on premise can represent a strategic advantage. And finally, there a host of scenarios where putting data in place outside the four walls of the company may create some legal potential legal issues that are best avoided.

And yet, cloud computing still offers a lot of immediate benefit when it comes to tactical applications. For example, there are a whole range of security and backup and recovery applications that make a whole lot of sense being delivered as a service via the cloud.

This, of course, is where the sweet spot for solution providers is in terms of cloud computing. Longer term, there may be plenty of opportunity to run all kinds of applications in the cloud on behalf of your customers. But right now, most customers want help with the tactical stuff that consumes a lot of their time, but adds no real value to their business.

There will even come a day in the not too distant future where the distinctions between cloud computing, software-as-a-service and on-premise software will become irrelevant. But in the meantime, solution providers in the channel would do well to focus on clear and present opportunities, while waiting for the next generation of enterprise computing to evolve to the point where the discussion about where the application is running is generally moot and all that really actually matters is how well are the various application components integrated.

For solution providers, that usually means sending engineers out to the customer site in the hopes that by setting up a proof of concept demonstration, they can close the deal. The trouble is that all takes time and money.

That’s why the solution providers should be paying close attention to CloudShare, a new cloud computing service that leverages virtualization to greatly simplify the setting up of a proof-of-concept deployment. The solution provider works with CloudShare to create a single implementation of the application they are selling that can be tailored for each customer’s environment. This way nobody has to lug IT equipment to a particular customer site, and the amount of time it take to get the customer to ultimately sign off on a project is greatly reduced.

The other side benefit of CloudShare is that it can also be used for deal registration. Effectively, a vendor could partner with CloudShare to set up a system where no solution provider was allowed to register a deal unless a working proof-of-concept deployment was in place.
In this age of cloud computing and virtualization, the way solution providers in the channel sell products is changing rapidly and, fortunately, it’s mostly for the better.

Data Security Tools: As the focus on security has shifted from the perimeter, solution providers are finding success with a wide range of security tools focused on securing data rather than access to the network.

Data Storage: No matter the state of the economy, demand for more storage space keeps growing. And until storage virtualization goes mainstream, there is still plenty of opportunity to sell storage arrays.

Business Intelligence: There are a lot of tools in this category, but the reason companies buy them is the same. After years of investing in packaged applications, customers are anxious to show value for those investments by presenting users with actionable information.

Smartphones: There’s not much money to be made on the sale of the smartphone itself. But a new generation of mobile applications is creating opportunity for the channel.

Cloud Computing: It’s still early days as far as the channel is concerned. But the convergence of cloud computing and managed services does create a lower cost model for delivering IT services.

802.11n Wireless Networks: Increased bandwidth, lower costs and fewer headaches are a combination that most customers can’t ignore no matter how bad the economy is.

Appliance Consolidation: All those devices at the edge of the network are now ripe for consolidation as customers have become concerned about the total cost of managing them all.

Virtualization Sprawl: In the back half of the year, customers have discovered that not only do they need virtual machine management tools, but that left to their own devices virtual machines will suck up all the memory they can find unless properly managed.

Application Acceleration: Short of a full network upgrade, the best thing for a slow network is a set of application acceleration appliances that offload high bandwidth or low latency applications.

Desktop Virtualization: Starting with a conversation about Windows 7 and aging hardware, solution providers are starting to discover that customers are rethinking their entire approach to managing the desktop.

Even in the worst of times, there is always opportunity in the channel if you just know where to look.

Cases in point are as follows:

*Most customers don’t really have the internal expertise to successfully invest in business intelligence system. This is one of the primary reasons that BI penetration as a percentage of the total market seems relatively low. But what if all a customer had to do was upload data into a service that cost $125 per user per month to get a visual representation of all their data in a matter of minutes. That’s the core idea behind a new Spatial Key service from a company called Universal Minds.

*Pivotlink is a SaaS offering that gives end users a more robust way to analyze data that’s easy to set up and a lot more useful than a spreadsheet. What’s interesting is they recently partnered with Primitive Logic to integrate their BI service into Primitive Logic’s human capital management software. There are probably thousands of instances where an existing enterprise application could benefit from a relatively quick BI makeover by embedding links to a BI service into the application, as opposed to trying to add that capability through a whole lot of application development work.

*Even IBM is getting in on the act. The company now offers a Rational AppScan on Demand service that allows solution providers to use the company’s application security testing tool as a service. Given the huge amount of concern over application security these days, providing a testing service that doesn’t require somebody to physically take apart an application is nice quiet way of addressing a major pain point without getting anybody bent out of shape about the quality of their code until you absolutely have to.

As the whole concept of cloud computing continues to evolve, it’s pretty clear that there will be thousands of ways to enhance existing on-premise application software environments that will all create opportunities for channel partners to add value. And as long as the solution provider is seen to be the one bringing the intellectual capital to bear to make these solution possible, it doesn’t really matter all that much where they actually run.

The ScanSafe real time security analyzer is to be integrated into its AnyConnect VPN Client. Cisco will be kind enough to continue to offer the existing service as a web-based security service.

As Cisco dives head first into the hybrid world of cloud-meets-network computing, the ScanSafe technologies help extend Cisco’s latest “Borderless Network” product line with real time end user web request, determining on the fly if the content is OK for consumption or is of malicious and/or inappropriate nature based on predefined group policy settings.

The  ScanSafe  deal is expected to close around June 2010 and then become part of Cisco’s security technology business unit.

In the mean time I am sure the accountants will be busy sifting through the ScanSafe’s books. However, they have had plenty of practice of late, as Cisco has gone on acquisition frenzy this month buying up Starent Networks  (Mobile Network Infrastructure) for $2.9 Billion, and Tandberg (Video Communications) for $3 Billion.

IT organizations looking to embrace cloud computing require tools that allow them to monitor the ongoing performance of a cloud computing service. To fulfill that need, Nimsoft has expanded the capabilities of its monitoring software to include cloud computing services.

This gives solution providers an opportunity to deliver a service to their customers that encompasses not only their on-premise systems, but can now also be extended to include cloud computing services, including Salesforce.com. Amazon EC2, Rackspace and Google Apps.

The Nimsoft Monitoring Solution is also complemented by a Web site called unifiedmonitoring.com run by Nimosoft that provides a baseline of statistical information concerning the performance of various cloud computing services.

The good news is not everything is going to move into the cloud. The world will probably split to the point where there are just as many applications run on premise as there are in the cloud. That should create an opportunity for solution providers because customers will be looking to integrate IT services delivered via the cloud with their on-premise applications. A good example of the opportunity this creates for solution providers is a new set of tools from Nimsoft that give IT organizations visibility into cloud computing services.

As time goes on, customers will also want to federate various cloud computing services, which will create another opportunity for solution providers as customers increasingly look to somebody to manage their cloud computing ecosystems. And finally, many customers will try to replicate the IT infrastructure used to deliver cloud computing services internally. That creates all kinds of opportunities around virtualization and infrastructure upgrades for the channel.

Like every major technology shift that has gone before, solution providers in the channel are threatened if they fail to recognize the change and then actually act on it. For some, that may mean becoming providers of cloud computing services. For all, it means more focus on consulting services. Whatever path a solution provider chooses, one way or another they will be pulled into the cloud computing vortex. The only thing that is unknown is what will their company look like once it comes out the other side of that vortex?

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