Discrepancies between which cloud services end users want and which are offered by the channel have been highlighted in white papers from the Cloud Industry Forum (CIF). The not-for-profit organisation recently commissioned research house Vanson Bourne to conduct surveys examining end-user and channel attitudes towards cloud

A screen shot of Rackspace’s partner program page (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Web hosting provider Rackspace Hosting ( www.rackspace.com ) announced on Tuesday it has improved its Rackspace Partner Program ( www.rackspace.com/partners ), which combines its four channel programs into one global partner experience. Rackspace’s newly structured partner channel program comes a year after it launched its partner program for resellers and affiliates . The program now provides partners with a range of additional hosted services, a centralized portal for relationship management, an integrated compensation structure and tiered benefits for different program levels.

February 9th, 2011 By: THN News SMB Dedicated Content Sponsored by StrataScale Server Hosting and Cloud Hosting Private cloud hosting represents a revolutionary new frontier in the information technology and – more specifically – the web hosting world.  Finally, the promise of computing power as a utility is upon us and it brings with it a new set of opportunities and challenges.  Many organizations are options to deploy their solutions into public cloud hosting environments, where there applications and data share physical hardware, storage, and network environments with hundreds or thousands of other companies.  While this certainly meets the needs of many businesses, many others are unwilling to take such a public plunge either because of security restrictions, performance concerns, or worries about loss of control of their infrastructure.   Because of this, a new hosting model has risen known as Private Cloud Hosting.  In the private cloud hosting model, your web site or corporate hosting infrastructure runs in a dedicated and/or virtualized environment and can be scaled up or down as your needs change.  The first advantage most often cited for private cloud hosting environments is that of security, which means both the actual physical security of the environment as well as the perceived security of the environment in that it is private unto itself.  Sites that strive to reach PCI compliance for their electronic commerce applications have found that private cloud hosting environments can be secured in a way that can allow them to successfully achieve this goal.  Physically dedicated hardware provides the assurance that no data can be mistakenly transferred or shared between businesses, which is obviously almost a pre-requisite for any electronic commerce environment.   Many private cloud hosting solutions rely heavily on virtualization technologies, such as the Xen Cloud Platform ( http://www.xen.org/products/cloudxen.html ).  The Xen Cloud Platform is a popular Linux-based selection among many leading hosting companies who are now offering private cloud hosting packages based on the underlying virtualization of the environment.  A cloud based on something like Xen’s solution offers the best of both worlds.  Customers are able to both control their own utilization of system resources as their needs change without the time and expenses inherent in provisioning new server and network infrastructure.  At the same time, the underlying virtualization technology allows you to fully utilize the hardware across a variety of applications and usage scenarios.  If designed properly, this sort of solution allows businesses to optimize both their time and money investment, while perhaps simplifying the actual deployment architecture.  For example, in an optimized private cloud hosting environment, you are more focused on the actual solutions you deploy (Databases 1 and 2, Email VM 1, Web Site 1 and 2, etc.) and the dedicated capacity assigned to each which frees customers from worrying about the nine servers and their various storage needs potentially needing to scale soon to a total of 14 servers.  One additional advantage is related to the topic of resource flexibility but can be presented in a different light.  A cloud hosting environment is uniquely positions to help your business manage drastic swings in workload, whether that be due to a new organization coming on board, a roll-out from a test phase to production, or simply an onslaught of new customers due to some improved functionality or marketing.  In the traditional dedicated hosting world, these sorts of scenarios can bring a business to a complete halt if not planned for properly (and that planning itself takes a great deal of time and money in many cases).  Private cloud hosting offers the ability to reduce overall cost of a solution, the flexibility to scale to meet changing business needs, and the capacity to fully utilize your hardware and network resources. Related posts: Top 5 Reasons Why Your Company Should Transition to Private Cloud Computing Public Cloud or Private Cloud Hosting Dilemma: Which Way to Go? Fusepoint Extends Private Cloud Hosting Solutions Pokemon.com Formally Launches powered by Private Cloud Hosting at INetU ThinkGrid unlocks Private Cloud for the Channel computing new frontier private cloud hosting web hosting xen cloud platform

A photo of Rackspace president and CEO Lanham Napier (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Web hosting provider Rackspace ( www.rackspace.com ) announced on Monday that president and CEO Lanham Napier was named one of the Top 100 Most Influential Executives in the Industry by CRN.com ( www.crn.com ). Operated by Everything Channel ( www.everythingchannel.com ), CRN.com provides information and business tools for solution providers and other channel professionals to help build their business. Napier was ranked number 18 on the list of Top 25 Channel Mavericks of 2010

Channel Programs Respond To Changing Customer Business Environments New business models and customer types are driving vendors to continually change their channel programs, with those changes being less about dollar incentives and more about finding new ways to partner with solution providers. That’s the conclusion of a panel of vendors discussing the evolution of channel programs with an audience of solution providers Friday at the Xchange Tech Innovators conference. Channel program changes depend on both technology changes and on the need to get closer to solution providers, said Tom Fitzpatrick, director of field marketing at Kaspersky Lab, a Woburn, Mass.-based developer of anti-virus software

VARs Question New HP CEO’s Channel Credibility HP’s top partners are questioning the channel street credibility of new HP CEO Leo Apotheker. HP Thursday named Apotheker, former CEO of German ERP software giant SAP, as CEO, president and a member of HP’s board of directors.

(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Investments in cloud computing solutions and services are poised to increase in the next 12 months as opportunities for information technology channel companies and their customers come into clearer focus, according to new research from non-profit IT industry trade association CompTIA ( www.comptia.org ). The study, however, also identifies a number of challenges facing both users and suppliers. CompTIA’s report, “Cloud Computing: Pulling Back the Curtain”, was is based on a survey of 542 US-based IT end-user customers, influencers and solution provider organizations