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We all know value-added resellers (VARs). With the rise of the cloud, however, many vendors and business may not be as familiar with hybrid VARs. These VARs are value-added resellers that have come of age in the cloud era and never actually sold a piece of hardware. They are strictly cloud-based, which is another way to say that they are strictly solution-oriented.

The hybrid VAR is relatively new for obvious reasons; until recently, technology solutions required physical goods. With it now being possible to offer complete solutions through the mixing and matching of cloud services, however, hybrid VARs represent both an intriguing evolution and also the future of the VAR community for many industries. Everything from call recording to telephony and CRM will be offered through such hybrid VARs.

Where these VARs drive value is through their understanding and linkages of various vendor cloud solutions. Their value proposition is that they know how to link together the various cloud technologies to make something better than the constituent parts of the services.

“We clearly understand the true benefits of every solution and how it will improve their business because we USE every product we sell to run our own business,” noted Stef Martin, CEO of hybrid VAR the Exigo Group, in a recent blog post. “From there, we continue to compliment our core platforms by layering on additional cloud solutions such as Google (News - Alert) Biz Apps and email, Ringio telephony and hosted PBX, Vcita cloud calendar and more.”

Martin notes that vendors need to understand the keys to supporting and encouraging this new style of VAR, namely price and the ability to link together various vendor solutions.

“After heavy review and vetting, we hand-picked these core solutions specifically,” she noted, “not merely for their features and muscle but ultimately because these wise vendors thought ahead and made integration seamless for us.”

Hybrid VARs expect competitive margins from vendors, but perhaps most importantly they need good application programmer interfaces (APIs) to drive the value that they are supposed to drive as VARs.

“Gone are the days of vendors attracting us VARs with competitive margins, fancy advertising, glitz and glamour,” she wrote. “Today’s VAR, if they wish to be stealthy and reduce bandwidth strain on their internal resources, have changed the game and introduced the ‘new’ number one priority in their choices to align with a vendor partner.” And this is the API.

If you build the API, she noted, the hybrid VAR will come.

As vendors move increasingly to the cloud, they need to recognize this fundamental shift and ensure that their services are useful to the hybrid VAR by delivering both good margins and the APIs needed by hybrid VARs to interconnect services in new ways.