Your New IaaS Provider May Be an MSP

IaaS is red hot, and since IT needs more compute capacity, instead of ringing up Dell and a week later installing a bunch of servers, you send Amazon an e-mail and simply add more horsepower.

Nixu Software, which provides tools to make application deployment in the cloud easier by automating IP commissioning, says MSPs - such as some of its partners - are more and more selling public IaaS services. Nixu has good sources, as the company says that 90 percent of the biggest service providers already use Nixu.

This is partly because many hosting companies, wholesale or private, label their services, so MSPs can brand them as their own. The same is true of traditional carriers and even cable and satellite providers.

Nixu reached out to 189 carriers and MSPs last month to find out what they and their customers are doing with IaaS and found “an increasing number of service providers are gearing up to introduce their own IaaS cloud offering. Compared to a similar survey carried out by Nixu in March 2013, the market is growing rapidly with the early majority showing signs of starting to initiate IaaS cloud projects.”

While there is momentum amongst MSPs, less than 5 percent of them have IaaS in live production.

IaaS an MSP Work in Progress

Table Source: Nixu

One issue holding back IaaS rollouts is fear that the NSA is snooping on all the data, Nixu found, and this is offering foreign providers an opportunity to differentiate their services as being safer.

“Throughout 2013, we have seen an increasing number of MSPs and carriers initiating their move to augment their service portfolios with IaaS cloud,” said Juha Holkkola managing director of Nixu Software. “Several of the large service providers have been a little slow to get on board, but after the National Security Administration’s cyber-spying scandal, service providers from around the world are seeing how they can successfully compete against the U.S.-based players. As we see the momentum starting to build up in a serious way, Gartner’s 41.3 percent projection of compounded annual growth rate for the IaaS cloud through 2016 seems entirely plausible,” he added.

MSPs should provide a ready market as enterprises and SMBs are moving to the cloud – and IaaS in particular – because they don’t have to continually expand their data center footprint.