Cloud-based services represent a multi-billion dollar market for companies in the business of providing communications and IT solutions—often referred to as "architectures." Yet it isn’t always obvious exactly how to monetize this opportunity in a way that will prove sustainable.

That’s why Cisco (News - Alert) on March 1st launched a new cloud partner program. This initiative is designed to help partners choose what role they want to have in the cloud, and develop business models capable of sustaining that vision.

Cisco identified three tracks or roles the partners might choose as they enter the cloud market. Cloud builders will design and implement infrastructures or fully provisioned private and public clouds. Cloud providers will offer public cloud services to the market. Cloud service resellers will white label (resell) Cisco-powered services developed by cloud providers.

All three tracks leverage Cisco’s Collaborative Professional Services (CPS) portfolio of intellectual capital, engineering expertise and service automation services. These services can be used by partners to collect and analyze data about potential offerings and get help developing and testing new services.

“Cisco's Cloud Partner Program provides a solid blueprint for helping migrate toward new cloud business models,” said Jorge Rodriguez Saenz, corporate business director of operations, ITS InfoCom, in Cisco’s announcement about the program. “It gives channel resellers multiple opportunities to capture the growth in the cloud computing market.”

An important takeaway from this announcement, noted channelinsider reporter Chris Talbot (News - Alert) said in a Thursday report, is that Cisco doesn’t intent to become a cloud provider itself, but instead wants to support channel partners who wish to do so using Cisco gear.

Talbot quoted Edison Peres, Cisco’s VP of worldwide channels, as saying in a keynote speech that cloud services are no doubt important, but that other opportunities also exist for channel partners.

“If all you see on the horizon is clouds or cloud, I want to suggest your focus is much too narrow,” Peres said in the keynote. “Cloud is part of a broad set of opportunities that we have before us.”

Some channel partners may choose to build infrastructure themselves, while others may find the development of services and apps more appealing, and still others may find most success as resellers. Hence Cisco’s multi-tiered cloud partner program, which not only creates synergies between Cisco and its partners but also between partners.

“The way we designed the program was structured around what roles can partners play in the marketplace and how can we uniquely enable partners who choose to play any one of those roles,” Talbot quoted Susheel Chitre, director or cloud and OEM development for worldwide channels at Cisco, as saying.

The program is necessary, Talbot quoted Peres as saying, because many customers are better prepared for cloud computing than the IT industry. Cisco predicts cloud infrastructure will grow at a compounded rate of 25 percent per years over the next several years, and that 75 percent of that growth will come from private clouds.

“A common belief in the industry is that cloud for businesses will move towards a hybrid cloud environment that connects private clouds to on-premise and public cloud infrastructure and services,” Talbot said in his report. “Cisco’s strategy follows a similar line of thinking, with the expectation that most enterprise customers will move towards a hybrid cloud infrastructure.”

Private cloud, a.k.a. enterprise cloud, is one of the latest trends in the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS (News - Alert)) market for delivering and consuming IT services.

“This trend is expected to accelerate as business pressures continue to increase for enterprises to deploy more agile and cost effective IT services,” says Tenzing, a provider of private cloud solutions, on its website.

Tenzing defines private cloud as “a highly automated and scalable architecture built around powerful administrative tools and virtualized compute, storage, and network services for efficiently managing corporate IT workloads.”

Wikipedia offers a similar definition for private cloud: a term used to “describe offerings that emulate cloud computing on private networks. These (typically virtualization automation) products offer the ability to host applications or virtual machines in a company's own set of hosts. These provide the benefits of utility computing -shared hardware costs, the ability to recover from failure, and the ability to scale up or down depending upon demand.”

Private clouds are especially appealing to medium and large enterprises looking for enhanced security and enhanced resource availability for front- and back-office applications.