A number of new cloud offerings, partnerships and announcements dominated the managed service provider (MSP) landscape this week. These included moves from companies like Sprint and AVG, who are looking to strengthen their roles in the managed services and cloud markets.
Sprint made further inroads into the managed services space this week by rolling out a new set of solutions that come bundled with on-premises equipment and MPLS transport services. The new Sprint Managed Network Solutions offer proactive performance management, CPE monitoring and customer notification, and installation, configuration and testing of CPE. Additional capabilities include network design, break/fix services for routers and circuits and high level SLAs. The solutions also include assessment and consultation along with a single bill and contact for services.
In major news for MSP Logicalis, the communication and collaboration solutions company announced it had relocated its headquarters from Farmington Hills, MI to New York City. The new midtown Manhattan location will help expand the company's East Coast presence as well as grow its international customer base. The new office will also facilitate face-to-face interactions with major Logicalis partners and customers.
AVG also announced a new partner in the cloud and managed services space with Infrascale Inc, a provider of cloud-based file collaboration and backup tools. The company will sell AVG's CloudCare solution, which is largely aimed at MSPs. Infrascale will aim to boost the use of CloudCare while also offering AVG customers, and particularly SMBs, a trusted backup solution.
MSP and cloud provider Rackspace said it was expanding its cloud network this week with the intention of having its partners resell the additional capacity as services. Rackspace will connect its existing network with its partners' networks through the expansion, creating a huge interoperable cloud. The company will help its partners launch services using its OpenStack-based software and hardware infrastructure and will also offer marketing help as well as infrastructure operations like monitoring, tuning and patching.
independenceIT and N-able Technologies announced they were teaming up this week to offer new resources for MSPs and to gain cloud partners. Through the deal, independenceIT will train MSPs who use the N-able tool to develop fixed fee services that are geared toward hybrid IT environments. The independenceIT nPanel and Cloud Workspace Suite will also be integrated with N-able's N-central platform as well as managed by the N-able Automation Manager IT delivery solution through the collaboration. This will enable MSPs to manage several products from a single interface.
