‘7 Minutes’ with HyperGrid COO and Head of Alliances Mark Mitchell

… on multi-cloud and not be “outdated” or fall by the wayside as workloads “just move to the public cloud.” They can build new, compelling, relationship-supporting business with their customers and net-new opportunities as they are able to competitively differentiate.

For organizations that come from the reseller world, where box sales have and will continue to stagnate, we create new service offerings and an annuity-based business of high economic value.

In general, we have a one-tier program in place, but in certain regions of the world, we do operate with a two-tier distribution model where, for example, local business rules or accepted practices support that approach. As an earlier-stage business, we are also open to partnering ideas and so welcome thoughts and different perspectives. What is clear is that we are in a rapidly evolving space and so companies like ours must respond and deliver.

We fundamentally believe that partners, with their deep understanding of end customer needs, regional requirements and nuances, and delivery modes, are an important ingredient in mutual success.

CP: Quick-hit answers: Percentage of sales through the channel, number of partners, average margin. Go.

MM: We are a 100-percent channel-focused company, whether it is through a managed service provider, global system integrator or other partner. We have more than 50 partners globally; typical margins are very strong and those exclude all of the other value they are then able to deliver through net-new service offerings and the like.

CP: Who are your main competitors, and what makes your offering better? 

MM: Our main competitor for MSPs and enterprises alike is the old way of managing IT and, in some respects, do-it-yourself. Many organizations think they have a manual process to manage issues, or try to unify their on-premises infrastructure and cloud deployments on their own, stitching together a number of expensive tools. It is the same with MSPs. Be it enterprise or MSP, business wants IT delivered in a services mode geared toward successful business outcomes.

On the product side, we are sometimes compared with VMware vRealize, RedHat CloudForm, RightScale or Turbonomic. Our advantage over these tools is the breadth of our service offering and our support for all relevant clouds, public and private. Additionally, HyperCloud goes deep into management of the environment, providing application management, cloud management and software-defined infrastructure across public and private clouds.

We believe cloud is not a place, but a way of doing business — a journey if you will. Our customers recognize and select us because we are a trusted, capable partner in their successful cloud journeys.

CP: How do you think your technology portfolio will change in the next three years?

MM: To be clear, all of our development efforts align to our software-defined cloud strategy, which empowers customers to adopt a common intelligent workload management platform across private and public clouds. HyperCloud expands hypervisor, cloud and platform support to remove barriers to entry so that customers and service providers make their decisions based on the performance, cost and compliance profiles for workload deployments.

I do believe over time our intelligent workload management platform moves from a …