How Can Cloud Services Best be Sold?

If we are indeed moving towards an era of computing where "cloud" is the dominant architecture, you have to ask how such services will be sold to enterprises, small business and consumers. You might logically conclude that cloud-based services will be sold in much the same way current products are sold to each of those market segments.

That is to say, enterprise sales often are sold by direct sales forces; small businesses are served by channel partners and consumers mostly are reached using online and mass media channels. The new wrinkles are that cloud services have a logical relationship to mobile devices, mobile apps and online provisioning, compared to older services and business applications.

"So far, no one that I am aware of has found a way of selling cloud services around the channel in any volume to SMBs without an army of out-bound telesales or field sales people of their own," argues Dale Vile, CEO of Freeform Dynamics. It’s hard to achieve serious scale that way, and without scale, the cloud model doesn’t work well economically."

'Backward' resellers impede cloud progress. Yeah, right • Channel Register