During a round table discussion at the recent European Software and Services Summit in London, Kevin Sparks, EMC channel head UK&I, expressed strong views on the role of partnerships and alliances.
"Not every application should sit in the cloud, we need to be careful when 70% of the IT budget is still spent on traditional computing," he said.
"Compliance also means access to data in a common format, in order to get the data access. We also talked about the use of service providers to get the mix of on-premise and off-premise IT modernisation. There is an opportunity to use service providers to do the analytics built on that data."
There was much discussion around co-opetition - working with partnerships of various types. The reality is that there is new world and lots of different opportunities.
People working in the cloud may want to bring it back in-house for data compliance or cost reasons; we have customers who want to put just certain applications in the cloud. A lot of this relies on transformation skills, we know there are shortages in certain areas."
And the value of this sort of event? "The whole bringing people together helps them realise they are not alone; there are opportunities to partner, there is a broader ecosystem there and it is not just necessarily about a product, piece of software, or services, but potentially the whole thing - how they bring it together and leverage those partners.