Managed Service Provider Week in Review

The cloud computing and managed services world is still a fiercely competitive space, and companies are partnering, merging and otherwise taking sides to gain an edge. Several major partnerships and acquisitions dominated the MSP space this week as major companies paired up to take on the bigwigs.

One of the biggest news items in this week’s MSP headlines was CenturyLink’s acquisition of Tier 3. The move makes telecom provider CenturyLink, owner of Prism TV, DIRECTV and Savvis, a major player in the cloud and IaaS space. The company is using the Tier 3 cloud platform as the center of its CenturyLink Cloud offering, and will also form the Seattle CenturyLink Cloud Development Center, pitting the company against Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure.

Speaking of AWS, cloud and managed services companies have been scrambling to partner with the IaaS and cloud giant. And Cloud Manager, Inc., a broker of cloud services that also offers a fully integrated management solution, teamed up with AWS this week. The Cloud Manager service is now available exclusively through Amazon and the AWS Marketplace. The integration with AWS automates billing, incident and device management processes, as well as speeding time to value for customers.

On the customer side, the number of cloud services available today can be staggering. Start-up company CloudScreener.com aims to make choosing easier and announced a free cloud computing diagnosis and comparison service this week. The offering enables companies throughout the world to analyze and evaluate cloud offerings using 120 criteria like price, performance, security and SLAs.

And on the developer front, GigaSpaces announced its Cloudify Application Catalog this week, which strives to make the OpenStack-based HP Public Cloud easier to navigate. The middleware company’s offering takes on-premises apps and “cloudifies” them to run on Openstack, making them more efficient through orchestration, load balancing and monitoring. The Cloudify Application Catalog then enables easy, single-click deployment of solutions on HP’s OpenStack.