How strong are distribution's relationships within the ISV community?

It's a question I ask them every time I meet with them. They all tell me it's strong. I can tell you it varies by distributor, but they are strongly investing in this. They love offering cloud services because they can actually provide a number of the components to ISVs. Every ISV I meet with wants to have a Software-as-a-Service offering. I don't know one ISV who doesn't want to have an as-a-service capability. The problem they have is that it is hard to run. First, you need to have a data center, and many of these ISVs don't know how to run a data center. Two, very often their application was not designed initially for multitenant, so they have to put in place multitenant capabilities. They have to be able to scale, and they most of the time don't have the cash for this. When they do this, we naturally engage in a SoftLayer discussion.