D&H Encourages SMB Partners to Adopt Cloud
D&H Encourages SMB Partners to Adopt Cloud by UCStrategies Staff
A Seattle, Washington-based cloud platform company will aid D&H Distributing’s channel partners to make useful moves toward cloud computing and related services.
Cloud Nation is a membership-based cloud services aggregator which is accessible to partners of the distributor. It offers a variety of services and solutions, and also provides a lot of training and community resources in order to help with transitioning to the cloud.
The senior vice president of sales at D&H, Jeff Davis, said: “We formed a strategic partnership between our two companies with the goal of helping small resellers get into cloud solutions. This partnership provides them with a platform that is easy to use, gets them trained and certified, and ultimately makes it very easy for them to transact on the cloud. We spent a lot of time trying to figure out if we wanted to build something on our own, or partner with another company. But the Cloud Nation platform is ideally suited to our SMB resellers, so it really makes sense for our two companies to work together.”
“Cloud Essentials” training and certification is included in the portfolio of resources from Cloud Nation; also included is a higher level of training and certification, access to a cloud solutions platform based on virtual desktops and servers, and turnkey cloud-based infrastructure solutions. Managed services, community access, sales and marketing support, and multi-tiered billing options are all ongoing.
The president of Cloud Nation, Tom Poole, said: “Before you can go out to sell Cloud Nation you must be CNCP-certified, meaning that you are a Cloud Nation Certified Professional. We've put together a curriculum of 10 in-depth courses that frame up the cloud discussion and explore issues like how to sell the cloud, how to provide service in the cloud, how to do sales and marketing support around the cloud, and how to assess whether a prospect is a good fit for the cloud. Some of our resellers think they don't need the training, but literally 100 percent of them come back and acknowledge that they learned a lot. So the entire ecosystem is pretty much predicated on being able to educate them and prepare them for these conversations.”
The curriculum is free of charge and is offered via D&H; when this is finished, member VARs can strengthen the platform to make cloud-based technologies available for sale, and these include virtual desktops and servers from a range of manufacturers such as Microsoft, Adobe and Citrix. Participation for Non-D&H partners is priced at $495.
The force.com platform was used by Cloud Nation to create its community portal, and members can use this to take part in a range of activities, review clients and prospects, set up marketing campaigns, deal with support issues and communicate with other members. Poole noted: “We've tried to develop an ecosystem that supports the entire community of resellers.”
Davis added: “This is exactly the sort of thing that [our resellers are] looking for. Most of our resellers were not born in the cloud, and they're used to transacting based on software licenses. But now they see everything migrating towards the cloud and are highly interested in going out and transacting in the cloud. They just don't know how, and they are looking to us for help.” (CY) Link