When we grew up hearing cloud computing, we were always told that everything about cloud is self service and we can cut down the labor costs, etc.. There are even self service management solutions that will help us take care of our cloud ecosystem. Suddenly if someone comes in and says they will manage our cloud services, one starts to wonder what is happening here. It is like hiring a human dish washer to wash the dishes using the dish washing machine. It appears to be a completely odd thing to do but there are some who do it just because they can. There are also some who are paranoid about anything machines and want help. I think Datapipe wants to target these kind of groups in the cloud world.
Datapipe is a well established managed services provider helping enterprises with servers, storage, data center services and co-location. They have more than 1000 clients and they want to use their experience in application management, hosting, security services, etc. in the managed hosting world to offer services in the cloud based world. Well, this is the irony of managed services providers who were successful with traditional forms of IT. When the traditional infrastructure can wear the private cloud gown and dance around in a cloud based world, I guess there should be a way for such managed service providers to transform themselves to the cloud era. That is exactly what Datapipe tries to do with their Datapipe Managed Cloud Offering.
Datapipe Managed Cloud brings the management of cloud infrastructure and the financial controls into a one single interface. Some of the features include:
- Access to AWS infrastructure. I guess they will be the middleman between the enterprise and AWS
- Their managed services including tasks like deployment, patching, monitoring, etc
- A dashboard for scaling and template management
Even though it is more like “cloud washing” their existing services, there are certain advantages for business executives and IT managers.
- They simplify the cost structure for the managers. They need not worry about the complexities for big organizations with the metered billing approach
- There are not many solutions like Rightscale which offers the entire spectrum of services from management to security and compliance to DR to whatever IT service you want to name here. Managed services provider like Datapipe can offer a solution even though the cost will not match the pricing of services like Rightscale any day
In this era of Rightscale, enStratus, Cloud.com, Cloupia, etc., I don’t really see a long term viability for managed services providers from the traditional IT era. But the market is still immature and we cannot dismiss them outright. It will be interesting to watch them evolve as IT moves more and more into a cloud based world.
