Hostways Cloud Connex Lets IT Partners Earn Recurring Revenue Without Buying Infrastructure

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Cloud hosting and IaaS provider Hostway Services Inc. on Thursday unveiled a program for VARs, systems integrators, MSPs and other partners who want to sell private-label services without putting money into infrastructure or development.

The initiative, Cloud Connex, is in beta but when it is released to more partners, they can take advantage of a brandable storefront template and customer portal for signing up new end users. They also may control pricing, provisioning, billing and payment processing through the Hostway console. Hostway says these capabilities distinguish its platform from Rackspace, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.

Above all, Cloud Connex allows partners to create a recurring revenue stream – something many still are struggling to do. Hostway said VARs can do this by delivering applications in Hostway’s public cloud, yet using their own branding and even bundling them with email and/or DNR services. For integrators, there’s the ability to package Hostway services with their own. And MSPs may use Hostway’s cloud to deliver services without building their own infrastructure or oversight portals.

In return, Hostway provides a tiered discount structure of 5-20 percent; partners earn larger discounts and payouts as aggregated month recurring revenue increases.

“For resellers, the cloud opportunity has been largely nullified to date by the inability to layer private-labeled cloud on top of their own services without building expensive infrastructure,
 said Todd Benjamin, vice president of hosted services for Hostway. “Cloud Connex provides that infrastructure along with customizable branding, pricing, bundling and billing that make the entire cloud offering appear to be the reseller’s own. This is a cloud game-changer for the reseller community.”

Hostway also said domain name registration from it and hosted Microsoft Exchange soon will be available.