Managed Service Provider Week in Review

Whispers of Dell contemplating going private dominated the MSP and cloud market space this week. Rumors have been heating up that Michael Dell is considering taking his company private, and is in the process of arranging nearly $25 billion just for that purpose.

While that may be both a scary and exciting prospect for customers, other companies are taking advantage of the chaos to push their own products and agendas. MSP Enstep chose to use the Dell situation to push its own Hardware as a Service (HaaS) as an alternative to purchasing expensive and cumbersome on-premise infrastructure and support from companies like Dell. The company is targeting SMBs, many of which are frustrated and strapped for cash in their futile attempts to keep hardware and infrastructure under control in house.

For its own part, Dell sees the potential of the cloud and is rapidly moving in that direction. The company announced a partnership with OnApp this week to offer three fully tested cloud packages that MSPs may use to quickly roll out cloud services. OnApp Cloud, which is on version 3, features a SAN, content delivery network, load balancing and management tools for managing virtual machines, billing, autoscaling and service set up. When backed with Dell's hardware support, the companies can provide full coverage 24/7 for service providers.

In other cloud news this week, Infrascale announced a version of its SOS Backup offering for hosted or managed private clouds. The solution is delivered as a white label, on-premises offering that enables MSPs to sell it as their own branded service. A centralized management system enables customers to create accounts, monitor backups and generate reports from a single portal. Users may also easily recover files and folders, desktops and laptops, and mobile devices using the service.

New York City has become a hot spot for data center capacity. InfoRelay Online Systems and 365 Main recently announced they were expanding their metro computing footprints in the Big Apple, which translates to big dollars both from a real estate and a computing capacity standpoint. The companies both use their capacity to deliver managed services and New York offers a central location that can service major networks like AboveNet, AT&T, Level 3 and Verizon.