MANAGED SERVICES
www.comms-dealer.com Prepare for a cloudburst TECHNOLOGY IN FOCUS
As IT models move from an on-premises to a cloud deployment model, resellers need to focus on the where IT is going and how they can survive the transition, according to Mark Seemann, Outsourcery’s CTO.
A
managed cloud service allows customers to migrate their physical servers to a virtual
environment, removing the ongoing management, upfront costs and a lot of the associated ongoing expenses. It replaces what traditionally was a capital cost with a simple monthly charge. Internal IT staff can then be redeployed on more strategic tasks such as running business line applications as opposed to managing sever infrastructure, which adds no real direct value to the business.
“Resellers need to move into the cloud or eventually die,” warns Seemann. “It is unlikely that most would be able to afford the huge costs associated with deploying the cloud infrastructure themselves. A move to managed services with a suitable partner is the logical decision. Once arranged they will be in a good position to take advantage of the benefits cloud and the capex to opex model can offer them and their customers.
“For example, a customer waiting to scale up a document management system would have to install extra hardware and software which could take weeks or even months. With cloud it could take days or even hours which minimises disruption for the end user and delivers a more tailored solution to the customer.”
Management and maintenance of server infrastructure is one of the key components when looking at the make up for a complete managed service. Another is a SLA which should include an upgrade policy, DR policy, operational policy and agreed reaction time. A key component is a forward looking plan of what customer infrastructure will look like in the future. This would also include future capacity planning and future technology upgrades to maintain a competitive advantage.
“Resellers need to start by first choosing the right cloud infrastructure partner, ensuring the partner is both financially stable and technically competent,” added Seemann. “A reseller must partner with an organisation with a flexible model, allowing growth and transition from low touch dealer to fully-fledged managed service provider, depending on the reseller’s current situation as well as their aims and aspirations.
“A reseller who has chosen a good cloud managed service partner will be able to take advantage of the partner’s solution knowledge, particularly in areas where the reseller has no experience,” added Seemann. “This will open up new revenue streams to the reseller as well as increase a customer stickiness, providing the reseller can identify customers
The partner relationship is crucial in the
managed services arena 50 COMMS DEALER OCTOBER 2010
Mark Seemann “Resellers need to move into the cloud or eventually die”
who have complex IT or comms management requirements, or have a distributed workforce.”
When establishing the requirements for a managed service solution a reseller must identify an opportunity, and engage with its managed service partner as early in the process as possible. Resellers need to undertake a requirements analysis, have access to technical consultants to map out the solutions document (as several revisions will often be needed), and quickly open a communications channel with all three parties. “The partner relationship is crucial in the managed services arena,” commented Seemann.
“The partnership between resellers and managed service provider is symbiotic as they both need each other to be successful. The reseller needs a managed service provider that allows the reseller to focus on its core business, while the managed service provider needs a definitive number of partners to reach the critical mass that is crucial to making all that cloud infrastructure investment profitable.”
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A cloud-based managed service is a highly scalable model that allows a customer to ramp services up or down easily and cheaply. For the same price, or less, the cloud provides more resilience than most customers could afford for a non- resilient on-premise deployment, pointed out Seemann. “Data centre redundancy, automatic hardware failover and a coherent contingency plan all mean there is no single point of failure, giving customers the peace of mind that their data is safe, backed up by an SLA that the on-premise deployments simply cannot match,” he added.
A managed service provider can typically employ more experts than most individual resellers with resulting benefits regarding identifying opportunities and overcoming issues. For example, Outsourcery has over 35 fully qualified Microsoft engineers on hand at any one time. Seemann commented: “Outsourcery recognises the channel is strategically important. Only through the channel can the company achieve critical mass as a managed service provider.” n
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