Avinash Arun is director of channels strategy at AMI-Partners. In a recent conversation with writer Colleen Frye, he discusses why high-value competency partners will capture more market share and higher margins from cloud services than other SMB partners.

ChannelPro-SMB: Your research finds that a critical distinguishing factor of high-value competency (HVC) partners is their commitment to the cloud.

Arun: A lot of partners say they offer cloud services, but in most cases they’re reselling a vendor solution or doing a bit of remote management services, but nothing beyond that where they’re adding value to the whole solution.

We’ve found that HVC partners are not just reselling cloud or one or two services, but are proactively pushing cloud to their SMB customers. They’re looking to integrate or build cloud solutions, and in some cases hosting those solutions themselves; they offer customization beyond a packaged SaaS offering. We also found a lot of these partners have separate cloud business units, with a couple of employees cloud certified.

ChannelPro-SMB: Are the HVC partners from all size shops?

Arun: It is the larger-size partners that have taken the first step. It’s easier for them; they have sufficient resources to take a risk and make the leap of changing their business model. For the mom and pops, it’s a very big move. They can’t afford the risk of moving their entire business to the cloud.

ChannelPro-SMB: Are these HVC partners getting help from the vendors?

Arun: Overall, there hasn’t been enough of a push from the vendors. A handful of vendors are doing it. From a partner perspective, one thing they’re looking for is a clear message from the vendor and their strategy for helping the partners, and we haven’t found that. The vendors are pushing them, but beyond a push to increase sales there hasn’t been a whole lot of support in terms of training/marketing/awareness for cloud. Most of [the vendors] don’t have a clear vision or strategy of how they want to go to market.

ChannelPro-SMB: What are the five high-value competencies AMI-Partners has identified?

Arun: One is core infrastructure/convergence infrastructure. Partners are able to provide networking/storage/servers all as one solution to an SMB. It could be cloud or on premise; today a majority are on premise with remote management via the cloud.

Business analytics is another. This has been the highest-growth solution over the last few years, and we expect it to keep growing. Particularly with the downturn, SMBs are very clear on the solutions they want to invest in, and intelligence comes out as a solution they want to invest in over the next few years.

Unified communications and collaboration [is another]. Today it’s more in the upper midmarket where we’re seeing high adoption rates, but especially with UC on the cloud side where you can download and start using it on a PC, growth will be seen in the smaller business space. Three or four years ago less than 15 percent of the partner universe was offering UC solutions; that has grown to almost a quarter of partners today.

[A fourth is] mobility, on the hardware side as well as the solutions and services side; so customizing, selling these apps that SMBs can access across all platforms, via the cloud. [And finally], business process management. It’s not something new. It has been on their radar for the last couple years but we’ve seen increased adoption rates.

ChannelPro-SMB: Must an HVC partner offer all five?

Arun: The proportion of partners offering all five is pretty low. From a vendor perspective, they would like partners to be competent in as many of these as possible. Most of the top vendors play across all of these areas. So from the vendor side they’re pushing partners to specialize across multiple focus areas and not tying incentives to just one area but from an overall sales perspective.