Most traditional IT and communications industry suppliers now derive the majority of their revenues through indirect sales channels. However, in the early stages of product and market maturity, they viewed their cloud solutions as a direct-only offering. With widespread customer acceptance and accelerating sales growth, most suppliers are now recognizing that channel partners are just as important to garnering cloud growth and share as traditional offerings. In this report, we define five core areas of a supplier’s strategy that require change and/or investment to ignite and optimize partner sales of cloud or any other recurring revenue model solution.