Artisan Infrastructure is a major player in the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) market, offering its services as a wholesaler. Now it has a new avenue of sales. Arrow Electronics has agreed to use the Artisan IaaS to protect NetApp customers’ data.
Arrow has what is calls the ArrowSphere marketplace, which is how it provides goods and services to channel partners. Now with Artisan’s help, Arrow doesn’t just offer data protection, but an additional range of related services through this market. The idea is to help partners get to market faster, spend less time managing the offerings, and to ease billing.
Arrow, through its market, is a connection point between channel partners and vendors that provide cloud services. “The ArrowSphere platform allows channel providers to build solutions that leverage their brand and manage contracts/billing, maintain a direct relationship with their customers and build a business with industry-leading margins aligned with their own value proposition,” Arrow explained.
The Artisan approach for NetApp data recovery is hybrid, where backups are done on-site as well as in the cloud. This can now be white-labeled by partners through the Arrow connection.
“The white label service provides VARs and IT service providers with the ability to custom brand a data recovery solution that meets or exceeds user requirements at a fraction of the price. The solution suite allows traditional VARs to expand their businesses into the cloud and enables cloud service providers to offer hybrid cloud (on-premises and remote) data protection capabilities to NetApp storage system users,” the partners said.
This fits with Artisan’s approach which is to only wholesale its IaaS services and not itself delve into managed services.
“We believe that ‘channel-only’ relationships are increasingly important in the cloud software and services space,” said Woodie Wallace, director, strategic alliances, Artisan Infrastructure earlier this year.
Wholesale Partners Abound
Another Artisan customer is independenceIT (iIT), which also serves the MSP community. Under the terms of a recent deal, iIT hooked up with Artisan to blend that company’s IaaS with virtual desktop software from independenceIT (iIT).
Under the deal MSPs can white label both the Cloud Workspace Suite virtual desktop and Artisan’s wholesale IaaS, and sell it all as a single offering.
Artisan Broader Storage Story
Besides data recovery, Artisan also does backup as well as object storage which it recently added to its repertoire, and is pushing low pricing as an incentive. The company is selling this service at an aggressive 29 cents a gigabyte. Artisan is taking direct aim at Rackspace, claiming its storage is some 70 percent cheaper than Rackspace.
Object storage is on the move, or so says IDC. “The worldwide file- and object-based storage (FOBS) market continues to gain momentum with revenues exceeding $23 billion in 2013 and forecast to reach $38 billion in 2017,” the research house says.
The broader storage market is also growing in the cloud. Gartner is one of many research houses tracking the cloud storage market, and did so in its recent “Forecast: Public Cloud Services, Worldwide, 2011-2017, 1Q13 Update” report. The research shows that “worldwide Cloud System Infrastructure Services (IaaS) Storage for end-user spending to grow at a 31 percent Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR), from an estimated $1.7 billion in 2013 to a forecast $4.9 billion in 2017.”
Edited by
Alisen Downey
