SHI International Credits Cloud in 28 Percent Revenue Growth

SHI International, a relatively massive IT services provider and one of the largest women-owned businesses in the country, announced that its 2011 revenues rose to $3.8 billion — a 28 percent increase over last year — led in large part by its recently launched SHI Cloud.

Vendor-wise, SHI International does business on behalf of a who’s who of technology giants. But the fact that SHI says its VMware business jumped a full 90 percent in 2011 may lend some insight into why, much like Dell, the provider chose August’s VMworld 2011 to launch the SHI Cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platform (ahead of even further growth). SHI Cloud comes in a variety of public, hosted private and hybrid “flavors,” but at the center, all use a proprietary, modified version of VMware vSphere 4.1 called “vCore.”

Meanwhile, a 44 percent boost to SHI’s Symantec business led to the company being named Symantec Partner of the Year, while Microsoft — the company’s first-ever partnership dating back to the late 1980s — gave SHI its eighth consecutive Microsoft Operational Excellence Award.

I had the chance to talk with SHI Cloud Director of communications and marketing Ed McNamara briefly ahead of this announcement, and he indicated that as much as the cloud may have led SHI to higher revenues in 2011, it wasn’t even slightly a marketing focus for the company. In 2012, SHI Cloud is much more in the spotlight (as you may have already noticed) for existing partners and customers as well as prospectives.

Basically, SHI International holds itself up as an example of a longtime legacy VAR that’s working hard at reinventing itself as a truly managed and cloud services provider. We’ll continue to keep track of SHI and the larger VAR/cloud service provider migration, so stay tuned.