As a MSP, it’s likely you have two types of clients: those that are already embarking on a journey to the cloud, and those who are planning to do so in the not too distant future.

As their trusted advisor, it is you that they will turn to. They will want you to demystify the cloud, to provide them with choice, and make cloud and connectivity an integral part of your service.

When the requirement is relatively small, for example, hosting a particular application or a website, this can be considered more of a procurement exercise than a service offering. But as your clients look to migrate more and more of their IT infrastructure to the cloud, how you fulfil these requirements becomes less of  a decision based on margin and increasingly more about your value-add, your differentiation and the lifetime value of your customers.

How do MSPs Become Cloud Centric?

There are several routes open to MSPs as they seek to include cloud and connectivity as part of their service offering, each of which has its own pros and cons.

Create Your Own Cloud Infrastructure – while this enables you to be the master of your own destiny with ultimate control over the service offering to your customers, it necessitates a significant upfront investment that is unlikely to be recouped unless you reach sufficient economies of scale.

Leverage Public Cloud Offerings – services such as AWS or Azure offer MSPs a scalable platform that they can leverage to deliver cloud services to clients. However, such offerings do not fulfil the need of clients looking for private environments, nor do they offer the MSP much room to provide a differentiated managed offering.

Act as a Data Centre Broker –there is always the option to act as the broker, consider cloud as a commodity and find the most cost-effective service (greatest margin) at that point in time. The issue with this route is that you will quickly find yourself operating multiple relationships under multiple contracts, service  and support is often compromised and so too is the lifetime value of the client.

Is there another way?

All of the above options have their limitations and are unlikely to deliver any competitive advantage for you, the MSP. At amatis we believe that the greatest value for MSPs lies in forming a strategic partnership with a cloud and connectivity provider that can truly augment the services that you offer – we refer to this as the amatis Advantage.

Through our continued work with numerous MSPs, we understand how they work, what is important to them, and the service they aim to deliver to their clients. This has enabled us to ensure that when we work with you as a service provider, our approach is aligned to deliver the features both you and your clients need.

We own and operate two data centres in the Thames Valley, both equipped with best in breed technology from Cisco and VMware. We have made the investment in a cloud environment and the amatis Advantage programme enables us to provide this as-a-service through MSPs.

The aim of this programme is to give you a partner of choice for cloud and connectivity services. A partner you can rely on to augment your current services and make you cloud-ready for your clients. The benefits of this are as follows:

Portfolio of Choice – no two customers are the same and we recognise this. Some are looking for a simple colocation solution while others are looking for a fully resilient private cloud environment. Any strategic partnership needs to be able to cater for the full range of requirements.

Evolution of Your Cloud – we can enable you to create your own ‘white-labelled’ cloud offering without the need for upfront investment. As the demand for cloud services from your clients increases, we can equip you with your own Virtual Data Centre providing you with the ability to easily provision virtualised environments for your clients.

Augment Your Expertise – you cannot be expected to be an expert in every field, which is why you need more than a customer/supplier arrangement, you need a partner. Someone who can work with you when designing solutions for your clients, and who will be open and transparent in proposing solutions.

Service Excellence – you are committed and most likely contracted to provide quality service to your clients and do not want to be let down by the third-parties you use. A VDC give MSPs the level of control that you need to manage the environment and deliver the levels of service your customers expect, all backed by our expert levels of support and SLAs.

With amatis you don’t just get a data centre partner, you also get a connectivity specialist which is instrumental to being able to deliver an end-to-end cloud solution. We operate our own carrier grade network and with direct connections into many of the exchanges within the Thames Valley, we are able to provide highly reliable and cost-effective connectivity directly into your cloud.

So, if you are reviewing your cloud proposition and looking to create value-add propositions for your clients, we would love to be part of this. As part of our Advantage programme for MSPs we offer a workshop, where we can scrutinise your needs and the needs of your clients to help you explore the options available to you.

To find out more or to arrange your Advantage workshop, please contact the amatis team or give us a call on 0118 321 9944.