As we continue work on our fourth-annual MSPmentor 100 survey,  it’s an ideal time to look back at companies from our third-annual MSPmentor 100 list. Among the companies we’ve been watching: BlueLock, which has leveraged virtualization and managed services to gain some cloud momentum. Here’s how BlueLock’s cloud hosting offerings fit into the IT channel, according to CTO Pat O’Day (pictured). Update: BlueLock contacted us regarding some minor clarifications – see below.

BlueLock’s made a name for themselves as a VMware-only shop – O’Day says VMware is the enterprise cloud standard with approximately 93% market share. In fact, he says that last year, BlueLock was named VMware partner of the year. The idea is to provide enterprises private-cloud security and compliance with public cloud availability and lack of investment and internal oversight – something O’Day says companies like Amazon Web Services just weren’t giving them.

That’s where their signature Virtual Private Cloud data center solutions come in. O’Day says that they’re dedicated cloud infrastructure, hosted with BlueLock, that makes it easy to move workloads and applications to and from the cloud in the open .OVF format. And thanks to the recent release of vCloud APIs, it’s easy for ISVs to code applications and host them with BlueLock, O’Day says. And they even provide disaster recovery services.

O’Day agreed that there is a market shift happening from managed service provider to cloud service provider, but that not every MSP can handle the overhead to overcome the challenges needed to get their own data centers set up – and BlueLock should know, having gone through it themselves. The key, especially for smaller service providers, isn’t necessarily to build their own cloud, but rather partner with someone (like BlueLock itself) that enables you to add cloud services to your portfolio.

As for the future, O’Day says that BlueLock has grown along the lines of nine times in the last year. The challenge facing them, he says, isn’t getting cash-flow positive, but rather managing their growth and staying conservative so they don’t implode as they phase from “young company” to “established cloud player.”

Update: O’Day got in touch to say that he misspoke on a few minor points: First, the company grew six times in the past year, not nine. Also, BlueLock was named “Americas’ Service Provider Program Partner of the Year” by VMware, not just “partner of the year.”

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