In the last installment of this column, “Who Owns the Customer in a Cloud Model?” (www.SDMmag.com/who-owns-customer-in-cloud-model), I described posing a question to a group of attendees at a cloud partners conference about who owns the client in the cloud — meaning which person and/or organization is strategically invested in assessing a client’s needs, delivering on them, and assuring their success based on their investment. I asked that question because there appears to be more people engaged with the client to provide them the solution than ever before.
However, there was one factor for determining who owns the client that all stakeholders agreed was the most important: Whoever bills the client for the application usage on a recurring basis was most likely to be considered the client owner. This is referred to as the partner-of-record.