By samdizzy

When SoftLayer and The Planet recently merged, the business combination created the largest privately held hosting company in the world, asserts CTO Duke Skarda, who appears in our latest TalkinCloud FastChat Video. Looking ahead, SoftLayer continues to promote cloud computing to channel partners, but Skarda also thinks dedicated servers will remain popular with VARs, MSPs and end-customers for years to come.

Let’s start with some company background. No doubt, SoftLayer has global reach. Strengthened by The Planet merger, SoftLayer now has 11 datacenters, 75,000 servers under management and 25,000 customers. Instead of betting SoftLayer also has a major channel partner initiative focused on managed hosting, dedicated servers and cloud computing.

By merging with The Planet, SoftLayer gains scale. Plus, The Planet customers gain SoftLayer’s automation platform, according to Skarda. On the partner front, channel engagements will be among “the biggest areas of growth for us” over the next few years, Skarda asserted. The company’s dedicated development team will work closely with SoftLayer’s dedicated partner team, Skarda said.

Now here’s where things get interesting. The cloud certainly is a key piece of SoftLayer’s strategy. But instead of hyping the cloud Skarda offers a surprising twist: He said the dedicated server market is “huge and growing bigger all the time. We don’t see dedicated [servers] going away anytime soon.”

With that thought in mind, SoftLayer’s entire infrastructure, based on dedicated servers and a cloud platform, will interoperate, he asserted.

SoftLayer’s merger with The Planet appears to offer economies of scale. But competition looms around every corner. On the one hand, The Planet must remain more nimble than small, regional hosting providers. On the other hand, The Planet needs to scale higher and higher to compete with publicly held hosting firms like RackSpace.

We’ll be watching to see how the SoftLayer channel strategy plays out.

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