By Egenera Guest Blog

We have been seeing the impact that the new cloud economy is having on managed service providers. MSPs are working to adapt their business model to this new paradigm, but adapting is far too complex. There are all kinds of challenges that have to be navigated, including learning new technologies, investing in new infrastructure, re-tooling for service and support, and revamping the organization’s fundamental business model and go-to-market strategy. And, it’s hard to invest in these major changes while the bottom line is taking a beating.

The good news is that there is now a solution on the market, the Xterity Cloud Service, designed to help MSPs make the transition to the new cloud-based economy with limited risk and investment. The Xterity Cloud Service is an enterprise-grade managed cloud service built specifically for MSPs and the IT channel. It enables MSPs to offer branded, highly available services for the most critical and complex multi-tier applications–without having to build, manage or own the infrastructure. This enables MSPs to focus on creating and maintaining customer relationships, creating custom IT solutions and maintaining their brand with end users. 

Making the Leap to the Cloud Services Business

The management software that powers the Xterity Cloud is the Egenera Cloud Suite (ECS). ECS is an advanced cloud management product that has been expressly developed for the MSP market to make it simple and practical for an MSP to make the leap into the cloud services business. ECS is designed around a multi-tiered distribution model, which allows MSPs to operate as completely independent tenants on shared infrastructure. Resources are placed into a catalog and then presented through a portal that allows each MSP to independently design, price and build the services needed to run its clients' businesses. ECS fully automates the provisioning of those services and provides the ability to monitor, track and charge back for the resources used to run those services.

Designing solutions for a client can be a difficult process, especially when it comes to more sophisticated IT solutions. To help simplify this process for MSPs, ECS offers a powerful designer (drag-and-drop) to visually create complex multi-tiered applications. It offers a rich set of deployment models, including private cloud (with both bare-metal and virtual resources) and public cloud. IT solution designers can leverage any combination of deployment models to make it simple to meet the price point and/or SLAs of a demanding client. The underlying catalog used to design the IT solutions provides a diverse set of offerings, including compute (virtual and physical) resources, storage resources, network resources, operating systems, applications and third-party services. MSPs can even create and configure custom applications, define firewall rules and set Internet bandwidth quotas.

Streamlined, Flexible Pricing and Billing

ECS is designed to help streamline the pricing and billing for the MSP, as well. For example, after an IT solution design is created, the MSP can automatically send a quote for the designed IT solution to the client to make sure it meets the needs of the client. The quote includes the pricing for the solution along with a network map diagram that provides a visual view of the customized IT solution. This makes the solution simple to read and easy to understand.

ECS also offers very flexible pricing control for the MSP.  MSPs have control over the pricing policy for each individual client through a margin control slider. This allows the MSP to offer discounts or to mark up the price for resources based on their relationship with each individual client. ECS even offers flexibility in the charging model, allowing the MSP to offer charge-by-usage or charge-by-resources-used for each individual client. An MSP may also offer their IT solutions on a monthly lease basis to enforce a time limit on the resources used by a given client. And, after a solution is built for a given client, ECS will automatically generate a monthly invoice and, optionally, send it to the client. This helps reduce the operational workload for the MSP and, thus, keeps them focused on adding new clients and driving new business.

ECS is also designed to allow MSP organizations to flexibly administer their client environments. Many larger MSP organizations have groups of engineers designing solutions for their clients. With ECS, an MSP can register multiple users and create groups of users with assignable roles. Each user or group can be granted access to a specific client or to multiple clients–providing maximum flexibility for the operations staff. And, ECS offers an approval process that provides the MSP with control over which IT solutions should be built and thus consume chargeable resources. ECS even helps the MSP with the day-to-day operations of the client environments, including tracking the health of the infrastructure, automatically healing failed compute resources and providing alerting for resource utilization issues.

In the end, ECS provides a flexible and automated set of business processes that make it easy for MSPs to build, deploy and manage complex IT services for their clients with enterprise service levels at the right price–all of which are designed to help the MSP build a profitable business. That can’t be said of the public cloud providers that just don’t make it easy for MSPs to make money because of the razor-thin margins they must adhere to. With all of the features mentioned above, we expect the Xterity Cloud Service (powered by ECS) to be a game changer for MSPs looking to make the leap into the cloud. 

As Chief Technology Officer and Executive Vice President of Engineering, Scott Geng has more than 20 years’ experience managing and designing software for mission-critical environments. He has deep experience in operating systems, distributed computing, clustering, high availability and middleware technologies. Geng led the Egenera software team in delivering each release since the company was founded. Guest blogs such as this one are published monthly and are part of MSPmentor's annual platinum sponsorship.