CompTIA's sixth annual "State of the Channel" report in 2016 yielded information that suggested that channel partners' optimism about the cloud's impact on the channel entered the "reality check" stage compared with a previous survey in 2014. In that survey, 63 percent of channel partners descried the cloud's impact on the channel over the previous five years as "extremely positive." Two years later, that number plunged to 37 percent.

"What we're seeing … is not a rejection of cloud but more of a reality check," CompTIA's April said. Part of that, she added, involves solution providers honing their cloud offerings, with some of them "Seeing that more of their value" may come from just helping their customers through a management role, which could include such functions as brokering or aggregating.

Another issue is maturity, and how soon a business and its internal IT organization can become more acclimated to all the cloud offerings on the market and how they can work for their businesses.

Their success in handling that will depend on the complexity of the organization, Mobayed said. That can benefit the smaller business with limited resources, but a more complex organization "will need the right partner," he said.