‘Nerdio for Azure’ Offers Full IT Stack as a Service in Microsoft Cloud

The folks at Nerdio say they’ve figured out how to turn the art of profitably delivering public cloud into a scientific reality for managed services providers (MSPs).

Nerdio for Azure is an IT as a service offering that enables MSPs to offer their customers a complete IT stack, hosted in the Microsoft cloud, with automated provisioning, management and optimization from the Nerdio platform.

This week, the company launched its new Nerdio for Azure Cost Estimator, to help MSPs better asses the expected costs of delivering cloud services and determine appropriate pricing.

Taken together, the products can mean huge margins for services providers, the company said.

“What we offer is a complete outsourcing of IT,” said Vadim Vladimirsky, founder and CEO of Nerdio. “By bundling desktops, servers, Office 365, security, backup, and support together in a single package and using Nerdio to provision and manage the service, MSPs make 40- to 60-percent margins on recurring revenues of $50 to $250 per user, per month.”

Just as importantly, the software adds significant new efficiency to the process of managing the IT, leaving more time to proactively work on customers’ strategic needs.

A top priority of the platform’s developers was shortening the amount of time and effort required to get a new IT environment up and running in the cloud.

“By standardizing the program, we’ve been able to take the two- or three-weeks of time down to two hours without any involvement from an engineer,” Vladimirsky said. “And it’s a fully functional environment, right out of the box.”

Automated optimization is also a critical feature because without it, running IT in the cloud can be more expensive than keeping the same workloads in an on-premise environment.

“If they try to price it out, it’s a lot more expensive to run it on Azure,” Vladimirsky said. “Azure doesn’t automatically turn things off for you. You have to manage it manually.”

“If you’re running those (virtual) desktops 24/7, you end up spending a lot of money on capacity that no one uses,” he explained. “We use intelligent auto-scaling technology that scales the environment based on resource use.”

The company says the tool is also exceedingly easy to use.

Take, for example, the fact that you can turn on backup and disaster recovery automation with a single button.

Or activate failover – also with a single button.

In fact, the single pane of glass that comprises the Nerdio Admin Portal is designed to enable a user to do pretty much anything in three clicks or less.

On Monday, Nerdio rolled out what they felt was a missing piece to helping MSPs maximize margins.

The Nerdio Azure Cost Estimator aims to take the guessing out of public cloud pricing.

“There are so many products and so many SKUs that it’s very difficult for MSPs to determine what the cost is going to be for them; what the price is going to be,” Vladimirsky said.

He offered the example of trying to price out an offering that includes Microsoft Office 365 and Azure cloud services.

“Office 365 is priced per user, per month; Azure is based on consumption,” the CEO said. “There are a lot of pieces that are priced differently and it’s hard to figure out what the price is going to be.”

The cost estimator allows an MSP to enter high-level information – like number of users, dedicated VMs, app licenses, storage requirements, optional features activated and any discounts – then spits out a reliable projection of the cost.

The offering speaks to a talent and resource gap among some MSPs that nonetheless still want to build businesses around cloud.

“Learning Azure is not a trivial undertaking,” Vladimirsky said. “Many MSPs are struggling to keep up.”

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