StrataScale President Describes IaaS Cloud Partner Strategy

When StrataScale, the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) provider, hired James Fanella as president in March 2012, Talkin’ Cloud wondered how StrataScale’s cloud partner program would potentially evolve. In an email exchange with Talkin’ Cloud, Fanella offered up the following perspectives on StrataScale and its IaaS partner program.

Talkin’ Cloud: What attracted you to StrataScale?

Fanella: Three things: the people, the infrastructure and the services.

First and foremost are the people; the executive team. The knowledge and depth of the team was important to me, and this executive team is exceptional. I felt comfortable with the team and was confident I could add immediate value.

Second, they’ve made a significant investment in data centers and infrastructure, which is a barrier to entry for many other companies.  This infrastructure is the “house” upon which we can deliver a full set of cloud services.

Third are the services that we have to offer clients; the managed services that underlie our infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offering. Clients like options, and one option is to partially or fully outsource their IT infrastructure. This flexibility is very attractive to businesses wanting to focus on their core competencies.

So if you look at it strategically, we have the investment in infrastructure, in managed services and we have a great management team. We’ve got all the components necessary to begin to broaden our cloud services portfolio.

Talkin’ Cloud: Your previous positions at NaviSite and other companies often involved industry alliances. Can we expect you to get involved with alliances at StrataScale?

Fanella: Strategic alliances are paramount to our strategy. Part of our growth strategy is our current ability to have our clients purchase cloud services through a 24-hour a day automated Internet storefront. But in addition to that storefront, having other companies sell our cloud services is tremendously important.

We already have some really great strategic alliances that are contributing to our growth. They have a direct reach that we don’t have, and it complements the storefront and cloud offerings.

So what is the value add for strategic partners doing business with StrataScale? We believe that our infrastructure, full portfolio of managed services, our strategic alliances’ ability to customize needed cloud services and their ability to dynamically provision the resources they need at any point in time – are all key benefits we provide our alliances. All of these benefits are wrapped around a 99.999% uptime service level agreement.

Talkin’ Cloud: What’s the key message to StrataScale’s resellers?

Fanella: The message is that part of our mission is to help you grow your business. And the reason why that’s so important to resellers is that the offerings we provide them, and the benefits of those offerings, can help them be competitive in the marketplace.

Our strategy is to help those resellers grow, because obviously we will grow as well. And so we’re going to continue to spend time and make sure that they’re successful. We’ll also continue to offer additional cloud services in the marketplace so that they can sell more of what StrataScale has to offer.

When you were at NaviSite, the company became known as a great hosting provider for enterprise-class platforms: Oracle, IBM-Lotus, etc. Can we expect similar moves at StrataScale?

Fanella: StrataScale’s focus is to do a few things extremely well. We’re hyper-focused on infrastructure-as-a-service, and ensuring that we offer an end-to-end service that enables clients to outsource all or part of their IT to us. We’re going to continue to stay focused on IaaS – on public cloud, virtual private cloud, customized dedicated cloud services – and to making sure that we continue to surprise and delight our clients in terms of customer service and support.

That said, we’ll continue to evaluate the possibility of adding other cloud services, but only when it makes sense and we’re certain that it meets our customers’ needs.

Intense IaaS Competition

The IaaS market is notoriously competitive and price sensitive. So Talkin’ Cloud is curious to see how StrataScale will cope with established and emerging rivals. We’ll check in with Fanella in a few months to see how the cloud partner strategy is playing out.