Managed Service Provider Week in Review: Buyouts & Partnering with AWS

It was a busy week in the managed services space and companies announced buyouts, alliances and new services covering the whole spectrum of the marketplace. AWS topped headlines again, unsurprisingly, as more and more companies work with the reigning IaaS leader to create innovative hybrid and multi-cloud solutions.

The week started off with two Texas MSPs joining forces in a buyout designed to better serve SMEs. Aldridge, a technology management and consulting company, acquire managed IT services provider Tydan IT. The acquisition is part of Aldridge’s plan to build out its services and expand its presence and follows a June buyout of Clyde Bennett & Associates, an EMR solutions provider for medical practices.

Ericsson accelerated its cloud presence this week by purchasing a majority stake in Apcera, a San Francisco company offering a platform for delivering IaaS, PaaS and SaaS. The Continuum platform was announced in tandem with the buyout and overlays the various cloud delivery models through a policy-based platform. Ericsson will add the solution to its cloud offerings to deliver complete cloud automation for running all workloads and use cases.

Verizon is the latest company to offer a direct link to AWS, and the company broadened its Secure Cloud Interconnect (SCI) service to include AWS. The move expands on Verizon’s multi-cloud services vision, letting customers choose multiple cloud infrastructure service providers and move their data and workloads seamlessly among platforms through Verizon’s Private IP network.

Workforce-as-a-service provider IndependenceIT made its Cloud Workforce Suite available on AWS this week as well. The hypervisor/cloud platform provides service providers and enterprises with a way to deploy anywhere and anytime desktop access. The platform also works with Google, Microsoft Azure and Artisan Infrastructure to give customers a choice of infrastructure provider.

And NovaTech announced a new managed IT service this week that aggregates a variety of managed, hosted and private VPN services. The new offering runs on NovaTech’s cloud-based platform, which includes a private cloud ecosystem comprised of multivendor enterprise technologies. The solutions are designed to help customers scale their IT operations while enjoying robust security.