Founded in 2005, Plutomic Hosting is a great example of how hosting companies can use OnApp to create cloud services that are highly tuned to the needs of their local market, and help their clients extend their reach whenever they need to using OnApp CDN. We spoke with co-founders Andrew Westfall (CEO) and Ben Chiapetta (CTO) about their cloud business, and their experience building and running services on OnApp.
As the saying goes, "there are two kinds of people in the world: leaders, and followers." Like all truisms it's pretty hard to argue with. Some people lead, and some people follow. The real question is, how do you decide which is which? When it comes to 'the cloud' - a subject fraught with contradictory definitions, hype, rhetoric and FUD - that gets even harder. That's why we launched Cloud Leaders.
Cloud Leaders is about the quiet revolution, the companies bringing cloud services to people all over the world. The hosting companies, telcos and service providers making the cloud happen. The companies who are, belatedly, just starting to get noticed.
Whether you're a user, a provider or an industry commentator, you can be part of this cloud revolution. Join Cloud Leaders. Tweet your opinions and best practices with the #cloudleaders tag, and mail cloudleaders@onapp.com if you'd like to get involved!
In my last post I outlined I outlined four strategies you could use, as an MSP, to counter the threat to your core business posed by global cloud providers like Amazon, Google and Microsoft. This time I’d like to take a closer look at the first of these - how to simplify the deployment of your cloud, and introduce the core features you and your customers will depend on, without unnecessary expenditure of time, energy and money.
It's difficult to write a blog post about OnApp Cloud v3.0, released today. There are so many new features that it's hard to know where to begin. Maybe we should talk about our new VMware support. That's at the top of the list for a lot of our customers. Perhaps it's the addition of video to our CDN (which, by the way, just hit 148 PoPs). Maybe it's our fantastic new control panel. For a lot of cloud providers, though, it's the addition of OnApp Storage that's the real highlight of v3.0.
With low cost, instant access to IaaS, PaaS and SaaS becoming the norm, the danger is that the shift to the cloud erodes not just your prices and margins, but the value of the M in MSP. The expertise you've created in your core domain - the value you've built painstakingly over the years - has been reduced to a simple cents-per-GHz equation. So how do you mitigate that effect? How do you keep the value of your managed services business, and defend your turf as your customers head to the cloud?