Managed Service Provider Week in Review

Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) is on fire, or specifically Amazon Web Services (AWS). While AWS has dominated the infrastructure landscape for years, its momentum isn’t slowing down and a variety of IaaS announcements related to AWS made headlines this week.

We all know AWS maintains the majority of IaaS marketshare, but now Gartner has said Amazon has five times the raw compute capacity of all its rivals put together. That’s a pretty powerful statement, and one of the many reasons third parties are flocking to support AWS. One such company is AFORE Solutions, which announced a new range of security tools to make AWS safer. Cloud Technology Partners also announced a tool that analyzes the source code of applications to ensure they are secure and compatible with customers’ infrastructure.

Cloudyn also released a new platform for MSPs this week, geared toward managing cloud deployments and maximizing AWS expenditures. The Cloudyn MSP solution helps partners figure out costs and profit margins for their customers with the goal of helping MSPs buy in bulk from AWS and better redistribute and pass on savings to their customers.

Intigua also threw their hat into the AWS arena this week, announcing the Intigua AWS Management Module. The solution extends the support of the company’s Intigua 2.0 automation platform to support AWS. The platform provides virtualized management for private and public clouds and helps enterprises keep VM instances in AWS aligned with private cloud VM SLAs, security and compliance policies.

SHI International Corp. is supporting a number of IaaS providers with its new SHI Cloud Marketplace. The online portal is designed to bring customers together and help them manage IaaS solutions from a variety of cloud service providers through a single procurement and management infrastructure. The Marketplace supports AWS of course, but also Rackspace, Microsoft, VMware, HP Cloud and the company’s own SHI Cloud.

Speaking of Microsoft, word on the street is that the company has been slowly and steadily adding features to their Windows Azure cloud offering with the goal of directly competing with AWS. Recent enhancements include new VM functionality, a business intelligence tool, multi-factor authentication and automatic backup. Analysts predict a steady and strong growth path for Azure, perhaps making Microsoft the most viable competitor to AWS at the moment.