Do you like getting paid?
Today, RackSpace Cloud announced a new cloud partner program designed to bring new business to reward partners for bringing hosting to the cloud offerings with the company.
Now with the Rackspace program program, resellers can receive direct rewards in the form of percentage points on the back-end and join in the financial benefits of cloud hosting.
Where Did This Idea Come From?
We got a chance to speak with the Rackspace team. They emphasized customer feedback and testing with beta customers as key drivers for this program. From what we can see, the developers said “pay me” and “make it simple”. And that is what Rackspace aims to offer.
“As a leader in cloud computing and a company that is committed to maintaining tight bonds with our partner community, we have aimed to create one of the most compelling partner programs in our industry,” said Emil Sayegh, general manager, The Rackspace Cloud.
How Does it Work for Resellers?
Rackspace Cloud customers who want to buy our hosting services directly and re-sell them to their own customer base. A reseller may divide our hosting services into smaller bundles so they are able to generate a profit from their customer fees, or build an application and attach it to the Rackspace infrastructure.
In a way, this model is like a reverse app-store, where instead of paying 30% like app developers pay Apple to be on iPhone, app developers get paid for bringing business to the platform.
If this program takes off, it could be a signal of a major sea-change where applications developers – rather than system integrators – are the one’s being rewarded for bringing infrastructure together.
And now the company has extended it’s offerings to offer a Windows product it is broadening it’s appeal even further. The new Windows beta allows Cloud Server users new and existing features including control panel and API access for create, delete, reboot, and rename functions. Showing that the cloud is encapsulating the server into common functions and administration is one move towards consolidated infrastructure.
From the press release. “The Rackspace Cloud Reseller Program offers discounts of up to 12 percent for resellers selling large volumes of cloud hosting across Rackspace Cloud’s services.”
This also might be a good approach to monetize great open source solutions. The software is free, but when installing it you run it on a slice of the cloud and get paid as part of the whole bundle from the infrastructure provider.
How Does it Work for Affiliates?
“The Rackspace Cloud Affiliate Program is designed for companies that have offerings or content that attracts users interested in a cloud hosting solution. It is offered as a text or image link from a site, blog, or tweet.
Members can earn from 5 to 7 percent (depending on the total number of referrals) of a referred hosting customer’s payments for a period of up to three years.”
If you see a button like this one on the web, be assured that the company presenting it participates in the revenue stream if they sign up for RackSpace.
Apple offers an afflilate program for the iTunes and the App Store. Many other online retailers offer similar features today on goods bought on the Internet, including Amazon with Amazon Associates.
When first released, there were some questions on the process and payouts that have been updated in this new release, including a cookie-tracking mechanic and easier ways to reporting on activity. It sounds like Rackspace isn’t giving up and instead is innovating further in making infrastructure a click-away from the web.
Will Amazon, Others Respond?
RackSpace is growing it’s partner network and incentives, and is offering a sales model that rewards applications resellers, developers, and web sites.
Amazon has an amazing affiliate outreach with it’s core store, we wonder if they will soon will offer more programs to attract software to bundle in infrastructure.
Will more and more software come with “infrastructure inside”?
