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HP to partners: Flog our public clouds ... don't worry, you'll get paid

VARs and SIs must wait until summer for billing control

HP has rolled its public cloud services into a referral programme for resellers and global systems integrators but those channel partners will need to wait until the summer before they can bill customers directly.

Private and managed cloud services are already available to partners but to date the public cloud under the Cloud Builder programme has not been.

"[Our] public cloud offering lets the customer dynamically use infrastructure, no commitment, no upfront payments, instantly provisioned over the web," said Dan Baigent, HP Cloud Services senior director of business development.

This takes HP's channel directly into competition with Amazon, Microsoft and Rackspace partners, which had a bit of a head start.

Initially, public cloud is being rolled into a referral programme or agency model, where the reseller refers a customer, becomes the partner of record and is then paid an annuity-based commission on that revenue for the lifetime of service usage.

This equates to 10 per cent of revenues in the first year and 5 per cent thereafter.

"[Channel partners] can get a perpetual, no cap, no termination annuity stream from their referral business to us," said Baigent.

But many in the channel prefer to handle the billing arrangement, something HP said it recognises is a key part of the relationship.

"For a reseller programme the partner will be able to resell those solutions directly to their customers and be the billing agent and we'll be able to expand that over time to do the user provisioning so they can basically stand in front of our cloud," he said.

A summer launch is planned because Baigent said: "We don't yet have that infrastructure for managing our bill to the partner."

Channel partners joining the referral programme will automatically be rolled into the reseller programme on launch, said HP. ®

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