Over the last decade, as providers like AWS and Microsoft have exponentially scaled their businesses and disrupted the IT industry to its core, many once-cutting-edge technologies and methodologies have become established fixtures of the cloud era by facilitating all that change.
We've seen broad enterprise adoption of container platforms, infrastructure-as-code solutions, software-defined networking and storage, continuous integration/continuous delivery, not to mention Internet of Things and artificial intelligence. But as progress marches on, disruptive change seems to only accelerate. The cloud has ushered in an era in which most new applications take the form of micro-services.
Instead of their monolithic forerunners, cloud-native apps are built as interconnected containers. And developers implementing that architecture are now discovering the value of a service mesh—an emerging technology that connects, discovers, monitors and authenticates communications between containerized micro-services running across environments. But it's the emerging AI development platforms, abstracting developers away from complex machine learning frameworks that call for skilled data scientists, that will take that trend down the food chain this year. ISVs and custom enterprise software developers, empowered by the giant cloud providers, will add intelligence wherever they can—deploying across their portfolios chatbots, recommendation engines, predictive analytics tools, voice-enabled interfaces, and automated security and management operations.
Further, It's not just Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure that are promoting a serverless paradigm for computing, in which clouds simply execute snippets of code without bothering developers with provisioning underlying infrastructure. As Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon, described serverless at the AWS re:Invent conference in November as the "next generation of how we're going to build systems."
The cloud also continues to collapse the taxonomies that have long brought order to the channel. Vendors are taking this to heart, restructuring their partner programs to break down the silos around ISVs, VARs, SIs, MSPs, and OEMs. Google is the latest, recently having formed a new Global Partner Ecosystem organization that combines support for the diverse partners within the cloud giant's ecosystem. The realignment came out of Google's recognition that the lines were blurring between its partner types, and the provider wanted to actively triangulate relationships between those partners.
Amazon, in 2017, rebranded its partner program from the AWS Channel Reseller Program to the AWS Solution Provider Program, laying the groundwork to encourage partners to focus on the primacy of the solution over any particular type of service.
For the times to comes, one can expect the well-defined business models that have so long characterized the channel to further deteriorate, and partners to form alliances (or mergers) with each other to offer their joint customers solutions not limited by legacy practice areas.
We present to you the “Top 10 Cloud Communications Solution Providers - 2019”