Distributors: primarily help the cloud provider’s business team scale to meet the needs of the community and manages a network of resellers.

Resellers: help campuses more easily acquire cloud services, and primarily address the needs of campuses, from procurement requirements, to technical expertise in specific areas (like training, machine learning, or healthcare), to research frameworks from the
NIH and NSF.

Distributors and resellers are key partners in the adoption of cloud services, and often already exist (if ‘behind the scenes’) in many campus technology service acquisition workflows. 

Distributors help Internet2 and cloud providers create a consistent experience across the ecosystems of partners and create a mechanism for more resellers to join NET+ programs, allowing more campuses to participate with their chosen partners. Resellers can provide a first level of support, and help a campus manage escalations to a cloud provider or advise researchers on how they might price out experiments. Many resellers also have a geographically-advantageous position (like supporting West Coast schools from the Pacific Time Zone), or field subject matter experts who can keep up on an ever-evolving set of technologies, and consult on how workloads can be built out on public cloud infrastructure.

With the complexity of modern cloud ecosystems, Internet2 NET+ works to design offerings that provide higher education specific terms that are consistent across a diverse provider-distributor ecosystem. In doing so, Internet2 NET+ is able to continue to provide guidance and insight to subscribers via the service validation process, and service advisory board.

In reality, a cloud agreement structure typically looks like this:

The Internet2 NET+ program works to simplify cloud agreements workflows, so a campus can adopt cloud services in the same way they make other software purchases. Something like this: