Playing Matchmaker in the Cloud

Telecom technology wholesaler AB&T partners with GreenAppX and Jamcracker to better facilitate the sale of remote services for its channel partners.

By Cecilia Galvin and Geoffrey Oldmixon

Cloud-based computing is broadening. This is not breaking news. In fact, channel whispers about profits in the cloud have become roars lately, especially as the economy continues to take some sharp twists and turns. Even so, as the trend continues, suppliers have to ask: How does the growing popularity of cloud-computing affect us long term?

BECOMING A CLOUD SALES FACILITATOR
AB&T Telecom Group is a wholesaler that delivers telecommunications and technology solutions to channel partners for SMB and government/education end users. The way it sees cloud computing, the cloud services trend isn't something to dread, but something to embrace.

AB&T seems to be saying, "If SMBs want software-as-a-service, they're going to buy those cloud applications. And we want to offer them."

AB&T Telecom essentially said as much when it made the announcement last week that it is partnering with GreenAppX, an online marketplace platform, and Jamcracker, a behind-the-scenes database and sales management solution, to help its channel partners sell SaaS, monitoring, and other cloud-based services.

"It's all about the end user," says Emmet Tydings, president of AB&T Telecom Group. "It's also about recurring revenue."

The purpose of the new partnership with GreenAppX and Jamcracker, says AB&T Telecom, is to provide a smoother transition to SaaS sales for some of its partners and to facilitate the ongoing subscriptions that come with them.

"We're providing a wraparound technology as a service, as a utility, as a pay-per-user-per-month service," explains Tydings, "in a full unified communications environment."

HOW IT WORKS
Essentially, GreenAppX is a virtual cloud services channel partner. The company provisions business-class cloud services otherwise unavailable to SMBs or certain government and education entities, and it offers them via an online catalog and marketplace.

AB&T's other partner, Jamcracker, is a self-defined "global services ecosystem." The Jamcracker Services Delivery Network (JSDN) integrates with the GreenAppX catalog so that VARs can very easily select and deploy the services requested by their SMB clients.

"The JSDN handles all the heavy lifting and back-office processing to make the GreenAppX marketplace a turnkey selling, provisioning, delivery, and billing platform for cloud services," explains Jamcracker Vice President of Marketing Steve Crawford.

What AB&T did, says Tydings, is build out on the Jamcracker platform a new Web arm of GreenAppX. This provides the so-called marketplace with agents and VARs that will sell hosted Exchange and other services to their own clients under the GreenAppX label. GreenAppX would "be paid a commission, similar to what all telecom agents do," Tydings says.

"GreenAppX also has the ability, because the JSDN is behind it and the way we built it out, to set VARs and agents and other reselling organizations up with their own Web store," says Tydings. "Or, we can enable their current Web site ... to be a procurement and management vehicle for their clients."