To drive those cloud services revenues, CSPs are partnering up with some key cloud computing and virtualization companies. Among our survey participants, the most frequently mentioned cloud computing, cloud services and virtualization partners included:

• VMware, 50%
• Citrix Systems, 39.3%
• Google Apps, 33%
• Cisco Systems, 30.4%
• Microsoft Office 365, 30.4%
• Amazon Simple Storage Service, 24.1%
• Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, 20.5%
• Salesforce.com, 19.6%

Channel Partners in the Cloud

Now here’s the interesting twist: The Talkin’ Cloud 100 survey attracted a mix of channel partners — from pure cloud services providers to VARs that now offer cloud solutions. Here’s a look at how participants described themselves:

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“Partner contributions to new business at Rackspace have continued to grow every month,” Rajiah told Talkin’ Cloud yesterday. “And we’re continually taking steps to make sure we’re in shape to support that growth.”

Indeed, Rackspace seems to be catching on with Talkin’ Cloud’s readers. Roughly 20 percent of the world’s top 100 cloud services providers (CSPs) and cloud integrators say they have relationships with Rackspace, according to our second-annual Talkin’ Cloud 100 survey results. And Rackspace itself landed near the top of the Talkin’ Cloud 100 list. (Complete results will surface on May 16 during a webcast, with online research debuting May 17.)

Rackspace’s Cloud Partner Strategy

How has Rackspace built channel loyalty? A few examples Rajiah offered, Rackspace:

• unified its partner program last year, giving partners a simplified approach to engage with the cloud services provider.
• launched a net promoter score (NPS) effort with partners. Rackspace was already using NPS metrics to track end-user customer satisfaction. But starting in Q2 of last year, Rackspace began to brainstorm how to launch a similar NPS survey for channel partners. The first NPS poll launched in 2011, and the results showed channel partners are impressed with Rackspace’s sales support efforts.

For 2012, Rajiah said Rackspace is enhancing its partner program in three ways:

1. Programmatic updates, including a learning management system (LMS) built for partners; a partner search function for end-customers; and a 12-person partner council to offer feedback and ideas with Rackspace.
2. Vertical market updates that involve solutions across e-commerce and content, such as the new Rackspace-Adobe relationship. “We’re building specialized solutions that partners can consume,” he said.
3. Transformational updates that involve helping IT as a Service providers to focus on Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) opportunities.

Rajiah also remains on the road, meeting partners and customers at major IT conferences. He’s expected to surface next week at the EMC World conference in Las Vegas. And he’s also involved in the planning of Rackspace’s next partner conference, which is expected to arrive sometime in the fall of 2012.

Rackspace certainly remains in growth mode, but the company does face pressure from Wall Street — where some investors recently expressed some concern about Rackspace’s growth forecast.

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This is Accel and Sequoia’s largest-ever joint venture and Qualtrics’ first investment run, having declined offers since its founding in 2002 thanks to its profitability.

“Today most research and data collection is outsourced at great expense, or done internally with tools that are either too basic or much too complex,” said Ryan Smith, Qualtrics CEO and co-founder, in a prepared statement. “We offer end users the do-it-yourself tools and rich analytics they need to be responsive to a fast-changing market, with security and collaboration across the enterprise.”

The company’s product offerings include the Qualtrics Research Suite, with advanced features such as conjoint analysis, branching logic and advanced customization, enabling customers to collect, analyze and act on sizeable amounts of unstructured data without customized programming. Qualtrics has more than 4,000 customers including more than 600 university customers.

Previously, Sequoia and Accel helped to fund Pertino Network’s Series A round for $8.9 million. Sequoia has also invested in cloud firms Appirio and CloudShare.

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“We’re very excited about this new release and how it will allow us to provide even better protection and world-class support to our clients and service partners,” said Jennifer Walzer, CEO of BUMI, in the press release. “The biggest challenges we’ve seen these organizations face are the explosion of data and the growing complexity of the IT environment. Both of these issues can significantly impact the backup window and impede the restore process. Since the upgrade, we’ve seen a boost in our ability to take care of our clients and help them overcome these obstacles.”

News features of the latest release include:

• NetApp API Level Integration. NetApp customers can now integrate with BUMI using using NetApp’s Snapshots, which free up hardware for the next job, significantly reducing Recovery Time Objectives and greatly enhancing Recovery Point Objectives.
• VMware 4.1 via VADP. Already able to facilitate backup and restore support for entire VM’s, BUMI has extended its functionality to individual disks within VMs (VMDK-level).
• Mac OS X Lion and OS X Snow Leopard Support. Using a mobile client built for laptops, BUMI can now offer its Mac users quick backup and recovery via user-friendly wizards and options.
• DS-NOC: New Network Operations Center. The DS-NOC gives BUMI resellers and referral partners a Web-based interface for real-time visibility and control. Administrators can easily see the status of licenses, capacity usage and backup completion for their customers.

The latest BUMI release is automatically available to existing BUMI customers and is generally available to all new customers.

This past January, BUMI launched its Cloud Recovery service (BCR), a full-fledged disaster recovery offering for SMBs that can’t deal with downtime.

Readers can click here to learn about the BUMI partner program.

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According to the release, LACCD chose Live@edu for “the technology’s security features and identity management capabilities, seamless integration with its on premise Exchange solution, and ease of use.”

LACCD is the largest community college district in the United States, serving more than 250,000 students at nine colleges throughout the Los Angeles metro area. MS Live@edu partnered with SADA Systems on the deal, which creates accounts for roughly 2.5 million student records and removes the need for manual student e-mail registration — upon matriculation, students will automatically receive an e-mail and collaboration account.

“Live@edu aligns with LACCD’s strategic vision to modernize and improve our colleges to ensure Los Angeles residents are trained with the skills needed to fill jobs of the 21st century,” said Jorge Mata, CIO for LACCD, in a prepared statement. “We needed a solution that would be easy to administer across all our colleges. One of the reasons we chose Microsoft Live@edu over Google Apps for Education is because it provides us with simple and automated management along with the visibility and control we need to apply our policies across our student information systems.”

About Live@edu: This is a free hosted platform for student communication and collaboration, with features including e-mail with a 10GB inbox, calendar, 7GB of additional file storage, document sharing, instant messaging, video chat and mobile e-mail. According to Microsoft, more than 10,000 schools in more than 130 countries have enrolled in Live@edu, serving 22 million people.

This is just the latest in the Microsoft/Google Apps cloud saga: The last time, Talkin’ Cloud reported Google Apps landed a government job — in this case with the U.S. Department of the Interior — after a lengthy court process involving contract irregularities with the folks in Redmond. Nevertheless, Microsoft had reason to smile when we reported that a growing number of VARs and MSPs  seem to be warming up to Microsoft Office 365 and Microsoft’s various business applications.

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New features of the Mule iON SaaS Edition include:

• Graphical data mapping and transformation capabilities – enables SaaS vendors and SIs to build and deploy integration apps without writing custom code by using the Mule Studio drag-and-drop interface
• Cloud Connector ToolKit – makes it easy to create new cloud connectors in Mule Studio for any public or private Web API
• Customer Self-service Portals – allows SaaS end user customers to independently manage integrations, minimizing dependency on developers and reducing support calls
• SaaS Operations Center – provides complete visibility into end user environments with a multi-tenant portal to monitor, manage and maintain integration apps

In addition to the new features, Mule iON SaaS Edition has a set of over 20 packaged integration apps and over 100 Cloud Connectors to more quickly realize the most common integration uses cases. MuleSoft supports billions of transactions each data; enterprise customers include Walmart, Master Card, Nokia, and Honeywell. SaaS vendor customers include Salesforce.com,  NetSuite, Workday, Intuit and Zuora.

Talkin’ Cloud readers can click here to learn about the MuleSoft partner program.

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The AppHarbor and AppFog efforts provide simple integration between applications hosted on these applications and Xeround’s DbaaS. From a cloud integrator’s perspective, deploying the add-on automatically creates a MySQL-compatible cloud-based database that connects to the appropriate application.

Xeround add-ons are currently available for Heroku, Engine Yard, Amazon EC2 and Rackspace. The company also announced last week that its HP Cloud Services add-on is available in beta. Xeround’s AppHarbor add-on is available in its FREE, BASIC and PRO plans; at present only the FREE version is available PHP Fog users.

The company describes its MySQL platform as a “true native cloud database,” designed specifically for cloud applications, something that CEO Razi Sharir emphasized during our briefing call last week.

Xeround’s DbaaS is applicable to both public and private clouds. The product is can be used by IaaS, PaaS and SaaS providers, and is available either as a Database-as-a-Service or as a virtual appliance. Xeround is located in Mountain View, Calif. and conducts R&D in Israel. Investment backers include Benchmark Capital, Giza Venture Capital, Ignition Partners and Trilogy Partnership.

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