Cloud Education

Cloud service providers are coming to the market with cloud training specifically designed for channel partners. To many partners, education and training separates the smaller cloud players from the hyper-scale providers, the executives said. RapidScale, for example, offers a program called RapidScale University covering basic to advanced cloud topics for its partner community, according to RapidScale's Jeter.

"I believe [cloud service providers] need to be an educator at this point. We did this a long time ago. We felt like if we invested and put an education tool out there, we would get value from it, [and] we’ve gotten a lot of value from it, but we’ve also realized that you have to have a level of education that [partners] can adapt to," Jeter said.