By partnering with ThinkGrid, resellers that are currently losing revenue to ‘direct-from-vendor’ cloud services, such as Microsoft’s Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS), can offer higher quality solutions with more functionality, at a lower cost, whilst still achieving a higher margin. Over 35 partners now offer customers a range of ThinkGrid’s cloud services, including Hosted Virtual Desktop, Exchange and Communications, VoIP, Software-as-a-Service,
Virtual Server Infrastructure and Cloud Storage that are purchased on a pay-as-you-go basis. The ThinkGrid Partner Programme is designed to help grow the channel opportunity around cloud services, and in turn deliver better margins and recurring revenue streams.
“Resellers have been suffering from decreasing margins on traditional software and hardware sales, as well as from vendors going directly to customers and offering their own products as cloud services. Direct-from-vendor clouds in particular pose a long-term challenge, as they conflict with the channel model and inevitably kill margin and value,” said David Pratt, COO at ThinkGrid. “Cloud computing should give resellers the opportunity to make double digit margins by offering customers a far more efficient, secure, reliable and sophisticated IT infrastructure.
Our partner programme ensures resellers are able to deliver high-quality IT services, at lower costs and a much higher margin than vendor-specific cloud services such as Microsoft’s BPOS. In addition, they are able to add a whole spectrum of other services and applications to ensure customers benefit from a single solution tailored to the needs of their business.”
ThinkGrid offers a three-tier channel programme: Silver, Gold and Platinum, offering margin opportunities up to 30 percent. Channel partners are able to re-package, resell and even rebrand ThinkGrid’s products and cloud services. Partners can also utilise ThinkGrid’s billing and provisioning engine, which allows them to buy at a wholesale rate and then tailor cloud services to specific customer needs. In turn, ThinkGrid is providing a platform for resellers to engage in cloud computing with no investment or risk. Resellers continue to own the customer relationship whilst ThinkGrid’s team works in the background, ensuring service levels are maintained and customers remain confident in this new way of working together.
Training programmes, sales collateral, joint marketing and qualified leads feature across the various tiers. ThinkGrid also provides ongoing assistance and a partner extranet to help resellers educate customers on the advantages of IT services from the cloud.