ChannelWeb has recognized LongJump as one of the 20 Coolest Cloud Companies, positioning it with the likes of Amazon EC2, Google App Engine and Microsoft’s Windows Azure platform. This comes on the heels of last week’s naming of LongJump CEO Pankaj Malviya to their list of Top 25 Technology Thought Leaders. As indicated by ChannelWeb,

“LongJump is actively rounding up ISVs to brand and host their own SaaS offerings.”

The channel community is one area where cloud computing can truly be a “sky’s the limit” proposition. With all that experience in IT and application services, VARs, MSPs, and solution providers can realize significant potential creating vertical applications that meet the needs of businesses across the globe.

It is likely why ChannelWeb is actively discussing cloud computing:

“Cloud computing platforms facilitate and ease the deployment of applications into the cloud, limiting the cost and complexity by cutting the need to buy and manage hardware and software. As cloud computing continues to gather steam and more VARs and their clients are looking to design, develop, test, deploy and host apps in the cloud, a robust, flexible platform has become a must-have.”

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Steven Burke of ChannelWeb summarized the major topic at this year’s XChange Tech Innovators conference in Las Vegas. Can you guess? Cloud. Specifically how can the solution provider channel leverage the Cloud as part of their suite of product and service offerings.

Says Burke:

“It’s not too early to call 2010 as the year of the cloud for the channel. Solution providers, from the smallest to the biggest players, were getting their hands around the cloud and planning their 2010 cloud sales strategy.”

With more and more solution providers, VARs and MSPs seeing a compression of their revenue and margins, the Cloud can seem like an additional threat because the first instinct is to associate the Cloud with purely virtualization of services with no delivery or implementation requirements. They might be true for some services that are fairly turnkey like email hosting or antivirus, but for other applications, particularly verticalized applications or departmental management applications like CRM or HR, there is a wealth of possibility in providing implementation, process consulting, etc. And some vendors, like LongJump, even offer the ability to whitelabel a SaaS application (or the entire multitenant platform), allow VAR/MSP partners to state their own pricing, resell prove applications, and maintain the relationship with the customer rather than hand it over to a vendor.

Burke also mentions that LongJump won the Most Innovative Technology award at the event for its ability to enable solution providers to deliver SaaS solutions to their customers.

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