HostingCon Global 2015: why taking a cloud position means big bucks.

 

We wrapped up an exciting and eventful HostingCon Global 2015 last week in sunny San Diego and wanted to share some key takeaways and impressions from the show. During the three day conference we met many hosting companies, tech vendors and IT pros at our booth, the wholesale cloud panel, and various parties and sessions.

When it comes to wholesale cloud, it’s fascinating to watch potential clients discover a solution like OrionVM, and realize what it truly enables for them in terms of features, time-to-market and revenue upside. At first they can be a little incredulous…”Really? You can’t be 50% less expensive than AWS and actually deliver a higher performing platform?!??” Then there usually is a “light bulb” moment when they understand that OrionVM’s cloud architecture really is different from anything else on the market. Suddenly the excitement of how easily they can deploy premium cloud services and what this means for their business hits them – especially in contrast to traditional approaches that had framed their expectations in the past.

Timing also is a key factor, as many orgs we spoke with already had million dollar investments in OpenStack or VMware deployments still being leveraged for ROI.  The irony is that their commitment to these legacy systems often prevents them from achieving the very benefits they seek e.g. increasing operational agility, ability to layer in new services, and generating enough profit margin vs. the price drops of the IaaS retailers like AWS that they must continually compete against.

“The reason why it is so difficult for existing firms to capitalize on disruptive innovations is that their processes and their business model that make them good at the existing business actually make them bad at competing for the disruption.” – Clayton Christensen of Harvard Business School

From MSP to CSP – hosting companies that have traditionally sold hardware know they need to offer cloud, but they often do not see a clear, profitable path to doing this. Wholesale cloud has emerged as the disruptive third option between the complexity/cost of building their own infrastructure, and the thin margins, limited support, and hidden scaling costs of using a public IaaS retailer.

Wholesale Superstructure presentation and panel

The themes of Cloud 2.0 and the wholesale business model were hot topics during our presentation and panel on Tuesday: Wholesale Superstructure: Evolving Cloud via Tech Innovation. The presentation focused on showing the dynamic relationship between tech innovation, the wholesale business model, and the growing segment of MSPs, SIs and VARs now able to compete against larger players. We explored how building and deploying enterprise-grade cloud is a difficult task – but one that has been radically transformed via technical breakthroughs and the extreme design efficiency of new cloud architecture. Leveraging these advancements, wholesale cloud now allows service providers to 1) quickly launch infrastructure services under their own brand. 2) generate new recurring revenue streams, and 3) concentrate on what they do best to gain a competitive advantage and succeed.

Cumulus Networks and Centered Networks, valued technology partners also joined our panel and both eloquently spoke about the IT trends and issues they were seeing amongst their clients and in the market.  Some of the questions we tackled included:

• Where are you seeing the most traction?  Who’s driving cloud projects in organizations?
• What are some of the biggest infrastructure challenges or concerns you have seen from clients or partners?
• Is Cloud a pure commodity (e.g., race to the bottom) or is it more of a strategic decision?

While there was some debate and differing opinions, one thing that everyone agreed on were the tremendous opportunities new technologies (software-defined datacenter, hyperconverged infrastructure, open networking etc.) have brought to the industry. Stay tuned for more analysis and a deeper exploration of these themes as they are central to our thought leadership and content roadmap.

Discover What’s Possible

The theme of HostingCon was highly relevant, given that “discovering what’s possible” is key to making better informed IT purchasing decisions and choosing the best product/services for your specific requirements. And this, really, is what infrastructure hosting is all about. As discovery is an ongoing process, events like HostingCon are great touch points for staying abreast of the latest advancements and learning how your IT options may have evolved/expanded.

In addition to winning a Sony Playstation PS4 (thank you Staminus) and eating way too much pasta in the Gaslight district – we left San Diego with some new friends and serious momentum to drive us as we continue to evangelize wholesale cloud and the new opportunities/profitability it brings to the hosting industry and beyond.

Did we miss you at the show? No worries, drop us a line here and take advantage of our HostingCon special (limited time offer!).