Rani Osnat Head Photo

According to Osnat, the official announcement of the Swisscom deal was more of a formality. The IT services provider has actually been using CTERA’s Cloud Attached Storage solution as a platform for over a year to provide its approximately 400 enterprise customers throughout five European countries with storage services such as cloud-based data protection and file collaboration.

“There are services there that have been running for a while and some that are launching right now,” Osnat said. “Based on our platform, they [Swisscom IT Services] has been able to launch a variety of services like server backup, cloud file access from the iPad, and remote manage storage.”

According to CTERA, Swisscom is using the company’s Cloud Attached Storage solution because of its unified management platform. The IT services provider can deliver different services to multiple business customers through a single console. That includes delivering storage services to mobile device users within enterprise business networks, remote offices and virtualized hosted servers. The Cloud Attached Storage solution also integrated easily into Swisscom’s existing object storage datacenter infrastructure.

Even though Swisscom IT focuses on enterprise business customers, Osnat said that CTERA remains mainly focused on serving the SMB community. “We are replacing older technologies in the SMB market. There’s a big technology shift in that market,” he said. “We want to enable top storage providers to give their business customers more storage-based services.”

Osnat also hinted that CTERA is not finished pursuing more managed storage deals throughout Europe. Throughout 2012, Osnat said CTERA will be expanding both its channel partner portfolio and its own in-house personnel in the United States and in Europe.