Recently I read a blog post of Chet Kapoor titled The future of the indirect channel in a Cloud enabled world. In the article, the new role of VAR's is positioned as Systems Integrator (SI). Why? Because the indirect channel knows your environment. We see past the marketing messages of Cloud proponents and look at your specific business needs. One of the key needs is that clouds somehow talk to one another.
Data, or more importantly, information, is not easily transported from cloud to cloud. It is easier for a company to add new features to its own application than it is to port data, real-time to applications in another cloud. So you see products evolving to add features that are not core. For example, project management software maker QA was forced to add revenue recognition into the application because it was too difficult to integrate the application with popular accounting applications.
But wasn't the promise of Best-of-Breed SaaS supposed to save us from the enterprise software suite?
SI's can make life much easier for you by allowing businesses to focus on the core value proposition of an application, with confidence that integrations are not as cumbersome as they once were.