By Michael Troiano, Chief Marketing Officer – Our business with and through cloud service provider (CSP) partners, who build cloud-based offerings on the back of Actifio’s VDP technology, has exploded in the last year. Today Actifio powers dozens of these offerings around the world, for a “Who’s Who” of cloud servicer providers around the world including IBM, Sungard, Time-Warner/Navisite, Fujitsu, and others.
The shift isn’t surprising. Once a week I hear an exec-level customer share some variant of “We’re in the [blank] business. I need to get us out of the IT infrastructure business.” Doing so is often harder than they expect. Re-writing applications is an important step into the clouds, but an application with no data is about as useful as a car with no gas.
Letting your applications access your data – whatever, wherever, and whenever they need it – is at the very core of Actifio’s value proposition. While this gives us a natural affinity for the cloud, we’ve invested a lot of time and resources over the last few years in developing the product features and enablement tools that our CSP partners need to be successful. Actifio’s products were built from the outset with a Service Provider focus – our co-founders were part of the engineering executive team at Storage Networks, after all. Multi-tenancy, security, and an operationally efficient service-level based approach to managing data are at the core of Actifio. Recent examples on the product side include expanding the RESTful API to enable greater, programmatic management and extension, and Resiliency Orchestration which will enable CSPs to recover 100s of VMs in a multi tenant cloud in just a few hours.
A Better Cloud Service Provider Business Model
Our shared interest in these partners isn’t just to drop technology on them, though. Our goal is always to help them build a thriving business on the back of our technology. Actifio is enabling these partners not only to collapse their infrastructure and radically simplify operations, but to transform the underlying economics of their business from one based on capital-intensive brand silos of underutilized iron to one based on delivering a host of data management services based on a uniform, consistent, scalable, and highly efficient architecture.
To help with that transition, we’ve added a whole host of significant “enablement” assets and capabilities over the last few months:
- Service Definition Kit. A tool to help MSPs define services, understand roles and responsibilities, set market pricing and shape service packaging based on what’s working for others.
- Business Model Template. This sophisticated but easy-to-use excel-based tool lets our MSP partners explore the value of Actifio in terms of pricing models and delivery cost.
- Enablement Kit. This set of tools is built to helps MSPs on board new customers, including a sizing calculator, service sandbox, and training on the content and service initiation questions that will position their services effectively.
In addition to enabling our CSP partners rapid time to market and revenue, Actifio has also focused on enabling our channel partners to resell CSP offerings, effectively expanding the routes to market for CSPs, while arming our channel partners with additional offerings to meet their customers needs.
Internally, we like to say it’s better to plant the rosebush than to sell the rose. Doing so takes all of the above and more, but it starts with an approach that aligns our interests with those of our CSP partners.
Given all this, we were incredibly proud this week to be acknowledged as a “5-star Cloud Vendor” by CRN Magazine.
The list highlights a group of technology providers who are best helping CSP’s meet the challenge of “identifying the opportunities and threats posed by the new computing technologies and, if possible, capitalize on them.”
I’d like to thank CRN for the ink, but more than that, I’d like to thank the cloud service providers who really are our partners in bringing Copy Data Virtualization to the world.