Purposeful Clouds partner strategy is driven by our customer requirements. In some cases we have a formal partner relationship with these companies. In others we do not have a formal relationship but we have done the due diligence to understand their capabilities. With our formal partners, we seek to nurture and build long-term relationships that result in delivering the best value to our customers. We select our partners to cover different areas of Cloud Computing and capable of providing different levels of service level agreements (SLAs). We have formal and informal partners that provide

• • Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

  • Platform as a Service (PaaS)

  • Software as a Service (SaaS)

  • Tools to manage the Cloud environment, measure SLA performance, and to transition to the Cloud

  • Tools or software development and control in the Cloud

We have partners that work primarily in the commodity space and provide reasonable levels of security plus availability and performance SLAs that are good enough for many situations. But we also have partners that can provide defense-level security for your and your customers' data, and that can provide high performance and availability SLAs.

Today there are a three-digit number of Cloud Service Providers. In 2-3 years there will be a four-digit number of them. In five years there will only be a two-digit number of them.

Source: Purposeful Clouds, October, 2010

The key areas that we look for in a partner are:

• Viability

  • In the evolving Cloud Computing space, companies will come and go and we expect significant merger and acquisition activity. We look for companies that are either strong enough to emerge a clear winner or have a significant customer base or technology advantage that their offerings are likely to survive.

• Responsiveness

  • Do they have the appropriate support infrastructure to deliver on their promises and to provide support for questions, issues, or other disruptions.

• Vision

  • Do they have a vision of their future and are they evolving with Cloud Computing or, better, leading the evolution.

The collection of these formal and informal partner companies allows us to take each potential Cloud opportunity in your environment, and match it to the lowest cost collection of providers that meet your specific goals.