Changes in how small business products get packaged, sold and provisioned seem an obvious implication of the on-going shift to cloud-based computing and application support. 

"A lot of tech vendors and channel partners are struggling to define channel partner roles in the cloud services demand chain," said Tim Harmon, Forrester (News - Alert) Research analyst. "On-premise technology variants are starting to lose traction in segments served mainly by channel partners, putting large numbers of channel partners, whose bread and butter is selling installations, at risk.

Conversely, cloud-based apps might mean small business specialists can sell business apps in a way never possible before. 

To be sure, off-premises, hosted or otherwise managed application delivery has been possible for a couple of decades, at some level. In the late 1990s the mostly-unsuccessful "application service provider" business marked a major change in thinking, even if ASPs did not generally succeed in shifting buying to a software as a service model. Jamcracker, Cloudmore,  Joyent, Parallels, ThinkGrid and VMware  were among the notable exceptions. 

But we seem to have reached "critical mass." Currently, more than half of channel partners include or have plans for application hosting in their services portfolios, said Harmon. And "hosting" is different from "cloud-based" services in some ways. 

Of those customers that have adopted software as a service in some form, 36 percent deploy it in an externally hosted private environment, while 40 percent use "public" or shared facilities.

Some 25 percent of organizations in a Forrester Research (News - Alert) survey report they will deploy business applications in a private hosted environment, while nine percent will use opting for a public hosted delivery method. 

The implications for service providers and their channel partners is clear, then. Enterprise and mid-size business customers will be buying more hosting services to support their SaaS (News - Alert) initiatives. 

About 21 percent of firms with 20 to 999 employees say they will host applications in an owned data center. About 37 percent plan to use an external hosting service, burt in a private environment, while 39 percent plan to use external facilities in a shared environment.

Of firms with 1,000 or more employees, 26 percent plan to use owned data facilities; 36 percent plan to host their apps privately, in a third party center, while 37 percent plan to use external shared facilities.

One might presume that small businesses with 20 or fewer employees primarily will use full software as a service delivery models, with no separate hosting expenditures. 

Still, looking at all applications, about 57 percent of survey respondents believe their primary reliance will be on owned facilities. About 25 percent expect they primarily will host externally, in a private environment. Some nine percent believe they will primarily rely on external hosting in a public environment. 

But there is a huge difference in types of applications survey respondents are likely to purchase "as a service" and those more likely to be deployed in an internal data center. Applications most likely to be purchased as a service include customer relationship management, e-purchasing, human capital managment and collaboration. 

Of the more than half of channel partners that are in or have plans to get into the application hosting business, 22 percent are expanding in new technology areas. 

The number of vendors with which they plan to have partnership agreements will go up by 16 percent in the next two years, Harmon said. 

Symantec Corp. (News - Alert), for example, recently announced Backup Exec.cloud, Backup Exec appliances, as well as an enhanced version Backup Exec 2010 software, aimed at small businesses that want to buy cloud-based versions of those products.

For the first time, small businesses will be able to leverage the benefits of backup from Symantec as software, as a cloud service, or as an appliance.

Symantec Backup Exec.cloud will be an ideal solution for small businesses or remote offices that want to offload their IT infrastructure, Symantec said.

The hosted backup service will automatically protect the data on Windows desktops and servers with simple, online backup and recovery. Furthermore, customers will benefit from an expanded Symantec.cloud portfolio of SaaS offerings, that provide integrated solutions for security, email management, and data protection.

Customers will be able to quickly protect their critical data by streaming it over a SSL connection to Symantec’s secure, off-site data centers. Backups can be triggered by file changes or run according to a set schedule, while modified files are protected continuously.

Should disaster strike, the service will help businesses stay up and running by restoring critical files to any service-enabled machine with just an internet connection. Employees may also take advantage of individual file restore for every day file retrieval.

Symantec said it plans to offer predictable, subscription-based pricing for Backup Exec.cloud. Read more here: http://www.symantec.com/about/news/release/article.jsp?prid=20110503_02