Cloudian's New MSP Program Takes On the Big Cloud Providers

Cloudian, the file and object storage company, on Wednesday unveiled a new partner program that will help MSPs sell recurring cloud storage services to their customers, rather than just reselling Cloudian storage products for one-time revenue.

The new MSP program will allow MSPs to provide cloud storage services to customers in several forms, including storage as a service (STaaS), backup as a service (BaaS), archive as a service (AaaS), disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) and big data as a service (BDaaS).

In the past, VARs have sold Cloudian products for use in customer data centers, which garnered one-time revenue, Jon Toor, the company’s chief marketing officer, told Channel Futures. Cloudian’s previous channel program was designed to help those resellers sell storage products to end users.

With the new MSP program, the focus will be on helping MSPs deploy Cloudian products in their own data centers to offer them as services to their customers, said Toor.

Cloudian’s Jon Toor

“The MSPs can sell it as a service to compete with other cloud services,” he said. “This is a program to help them resell Cloudian as an ongoing revenue source for MSPs. We have a wide range of MSPs who want to be in this business.”

Many MSPs have been coming to Cloudian and asking for help in getting started, Toor said.

“If they are buying cloud services from Google, they are just selling those services,” said Toor. “If they do it this way with Cloudian, they are running it themselves.”

So far, Cloudian has about 100 MSP partners and the company hopes to add more in the future.

Cloudian had not provided an opportunity for smaller partners to offer these kinds of services to their customers before.

“Two things changed to make it happen,” Toor said. “There is now a wide range of VARs who want to get into this business, with a wide range of experience. And now we are providing the services to help them.”

Cloudian is working with third-party vendors including Rubrik, Splunk and Pure Storage to help their MSP partners set up their S3-based cloud services, storage types and more to get up and running to sell the services, said Toor. MSPs will be able to pay as they go for the storage resources as they sell the services to their customers, which allows partners to only pay for the services they consume each month. Cloudian sells all of its products through the channel.

Cloudian’s S3-compatible storage includes its highly scalable HyperStore object storage platform and its HyperFile enterprise NAS file services. The products include integrated management tools such as billing and quality-of-service controls; multitenancy to provide users with secure, self-managed storage within a shared platform; and geo-distribution for managing storage across multiple data centers. Also included is support for SMB/NFS storage services and a choice of configurations, including software-defined storage and pre-configured appliances.

The new MSP program also includes co-branded sales and support documentation, a partner portal, online training and around-the-clock technical support.

A recent IDC study reports that within the public cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) market, cloud storage service revenue is expected to reach $20 billion in 2019 and more than double to $44 billion in the next three years.

Greg Schulz, principal analyst with StorageIO, told Channel Futures that the new Cloudian MSP program will give customers more choices as they search for cloud strategies for their businesses. By getting more MSPs involved in providing cloud services, many customers will be attracted to …

… dealing with smaller companies that can better serve their specific needs, said Schulz.

StorageIO’s Greg Schulz

“If you go by what you’re hearing out there, then the big cloud providers, like Azure, Google and Amazon, they’ve got all the cloud stuff covered,” he said. “So why would an MSP need someone like Cloudian to do it? First, the big cloud providers are at scale and their solutions may not do everything that is needed for every customer, such as when the customer wants to have some control or work with a smaller specialized company rather than work with a big provider.”

Even the large cloud providers are recognizing this emerging market and are starting to put smaller versions of their S3 services into smaller data centers where MSPs are working, said Schulz.

“They’re moving into the places and spaces where the MSPs have been playing and having success,” he said.

Cloudian’s new MSP program is following that trend.

“They’re providing the technology to the MSP or regional cloud providers who have specialized customers in different locations where they want turnkey software and hardware,” Schulz added. “They’re seeing there is a need there and that they better go fill it.”

Under the new program, Cloudian wants to be in the business of better serving its customers, said Schulz.

“It’s all about supporting the compute and storage needs out at the edge and adjacent to or near where those customers are. It’s good for their partner and in turn for their partners’ customers,” he said. “It’s good business.”