Managed Service Provider Week in Review

It seems as if everyone’s a partner in the managed services space these days. Cultivating the right partnerships is the key to surviving in the highly competitive MSP world, and companies were teaming up left and right this week in a bid to jockey for a better position.

Three Red Hat partners are taking advantage of work they’ve done with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to ensure their software functions properly on the platform. CITYTECH, Shadow-Soft and Vizuri are all taking part in the AWS Test Drive program, which provides Test Drive labs on a complimentary basis as well as certain amounts of AWS server time.

Google decided to properly reward its cloud partners this week and is getting ready to roll out a tiered partner program for the Google Cloud Platform (which the company announced, ironically, at a Red Hat conference). The new program would purportedly facilitate cloud solution provider partnerships along with technology and system integrator relationships. The move is the latest in Google’s bid to take on AWS and Microsoft Azure in the IaaS space.

Virtacore, a provider of high availability IaaS and DR service solutions, was on the lookout for MSP partners this week. The company has launched a new vChannel Reseller Program across the U.S., designed to attract and support resellers and MSPs.

On the backup and disaster recovery front, Persistent Systems teamed up with Dell this week. The company, which offers the rCloud disaster recovery service, will work with Dell to provide cloud-based recovery services to its massive network of customers. Cloud backup solutions provider Intronis also teamed up with Continuum, which offers an RMM platform. Monitoring of Intronis cloud backups has been integrated with Continuum’s platform through the partnership, making it easier for MSPs to stay on top of service monitoring.                                  

Managed network provider NetWolves partnered with cloud services and DaaS provider RapidScale this week as well. RapidScale solutions will now be offered through NetWolves’ portfolio of services. And in major Web development news, Web hosting giant GoDaddy has teamed up with WordPress. The company is launching a Managed WordPress platform dedicated to optimizing and supporting the WordPress CMS.