Amazon AWS is picking up third parties like a mother of ten buys groceries -- the AWS bag is full if not bursting. Latest case in point is Cloud Manager, Inc. which claims it is the first broker of cloud services to also have a management solution that is fully integrated. Now that new service is available only through Amazon and its AWS Marketplace.
This is the choice many third parties must make – exclusively support the clear IaaS leader AWS or do lots of extra work to also run on platforms with lesser share such as Microsoft Windows Azure.
The AWS Marketplace is big and getting bigger, having increased its number of offerings 71 percent to over 1,100 preconfigured bits of software, and the usage hours have grown seven-fold.
Cloud Manager, meanwhile, “focuses on integration and aggregation processes to give customers greater efficiencies to leverage their current systems. Specifically, Cloud Manager is the first AWS-based CSB to offer the ability to integrate AWS with IT Business Management solutions such as Autotask,” the company said, “The integration automates key billing, incident and device management processes and speeds time to value when using the two platforms. Cloud Manager also can connect cPanel to Autotask to provide AWS customers integrated hosting solutions – all from a single, easy-to-use console.”
Partner Autotask sells hosted IT business management software to service providers such as MSPs, VARs and ISVs. Autotask Pro, for instance, is sold using the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model and “integrates a broad range of critical business systems including customer relationship management (CRM), service desk, technician scheduling, project management, billing and reporting, and provides real-time service intelligence to help business owners understand the factors that affect their operations and their profitability,” the company said.
CSB Market Insight
Gartner follows the cloud service provider market, and Gartner Fellow Darryl Plummer said “A viable CSB provider can make it less expensive, easier, safer and more productive for companies to navigate, integrate, consume and extend cloud services, particularly when they span multiple, diverse cloud services providers.”
The research house further finds that in two years, one-fifth of cloud services will be come through brokers.“It’s no secret that businesses everywhere are migrating their core services and functions to the cloud,” noted Craig Deveson, Founder/CEO of Cloud Manager Inc. “That migration, however, creates complexity and confusion, which invariably mandate the need for a cloud services brokerage such as ours to create both cost and executional efficiencies.”
Why AWS is Winning
For partners, AWS is the cloud place to be. In Gartner’s latest ‘Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service,’ AWS far outstripped all its rivals. “AWS is the overwhelming market share leader, with more than five times the compute capacity in use than the aggregate total of the other fourteen providers in this Magic Quadrant. It is a thought leader; it is extraordinarily innovative, exceptionally agile and very responsive to the market. It has the richest IaaS product portfolio, and is constantly expanding its service offerings and reducing its prices. It has by far the largest pool of capacity, which makes its service one of the few suitable for batch computing, especially for workloads that require short-term provisioning of hundreds of servers at a time,” the research house said.
The AWS ecosystem has grown out of AWS’ success and is now adding to it. “AWS has a very large technology partner ecosystem. Many software vendors have specially licensed and packaged their software to run on EC2, either independently or via the AWS Marketplace, which eases deployment and eliminates some of the challenges associated with licensing software to run in the cloud.”
Edited by
Cassandra Tucker
