Executive Interview: Dimension Data's Managed Services for Data Centers

It’s been about eight months since IT services giant and top-ranked MSPmentor 501 2015 company Dimension Data announced it would deploy globally standardized managed services for data centers.

The service, built on the organization’s managed services automation platform, manages server, storage and networks for on-premise, cloud and hybrid data centers, the company said in a statement in September. Those services can be in the client’s data centers, colocation facilities, in the public cloud, in a private cloud, or in Dimension Data’s cloud.

But MSPmentor wanted to find out more about managed services for data centers so we recently caught up with Richard Garratt, the executive who leads the data center business unit for Dimension Data in the Americas. The following are excerpts of our interview with him. Here’s what he told us.

MSPmentor: Why did Dimension Data get started with this?

Garratt: The introduction stemmed from a couple things. We’ve been selling cloud solutions for two to three years, and we’ve seen many clients in the enterprise space want some form of private cloud. In most cases that architecture is something that they chose themselves. And at that time they are also looking for someone to manage it.  We cross-tabbed this information with research we commissioned that showed if the client was building a private cloud, they were looking for someone else to manage it. 

MSPmentor: Give us some perspective on the market as you see it.

Garratt: Our approach from a data center perspective is talking to our clients about the next generation data center. This encompasses includes helping clients understand more about the move to new models including hybrid, colocation, multitenant cloud providers and more.

Tectonic shifts are happening in the data center space. Companies are looking at cloud opportunities. Replatforming ERP applications, big data solutions. That’s the realm of data center we talk to. When we provide those solutions it includes everything across the stack. We will work with our sister companies in the NTT group. NTT data is very strong on the applications side of the house, refactoring apps. (Japanese telecom giant NTT acquired Dimension Data in 2010)

MSPmentor: Tell us more about Dimension Data’s offering for this space.

Garratt: The offering around managed services for data centers — launched in October last year, does 10 or 11 of the primary things in ITIL. We offer it in three packages — Essentials, Advanced, and Premiere across those ITIL service elements. We’ve designed it to manage compute, storage, and it complements managed services offerings we already had around networking and security.

We’ve seen the demand for the offering is actually quite large. Customers are in the top end of the client base and include global multinationals and midsized enterprise.

I’m also seeing project based work come out in those multinationals. For instance in VDI.

The largest footprints of initial deals have been at client sites. Sixty percent of deals are in that space. The other 40 percent are in colocation scenarios. NTT or Equinix or the like. 

We are a large cloud provider ourselves with a large multitenant public cloud. But when I go and speak to some senior contacts in the client space, they may be with AWS or Microsoft’s Azure.  We can help them manage the services with those cloud providers. It brings back a little bit of that control and governance into that.

MSPmentor: What do clients look for in managed services for data center?

Garratt: Clients like the simplicity of something that sounds packaged. But they also like choice. Clients like to pick and choose from available service components. That said, they want to make sure the components they are consuming are well packaged, and have SLAs of four or five nines. But the conversation needs to be fairly simple. At the macro level it’s about what do you really need us to take care of.

MSPmentor: How has the managed services for data centers been received in the market?

Garratt: Overall the offering has been fairly well received. Adoption from our clients has been good, and I see it accelerating in the second half of 2015. With any new service there is a lot of enablement. I think we are now starting to see the acceleration in our pipeline and client development. We are also looking at points of sale to attach these types of services. Many customers still buying infrastructure. There’s an opportunity to attach these services at point of sale. For instance, attach services at point of sale for big data Hadoop infrastructure. Again, the bonus or benefit is that the client understands what level of service they can contract. 

MSPmentor: So you are offering managed data center services and help clients with them in third-party clouds. But you are also a cloud provider yourself. How does that work?

Garratt: There are very few companies are like Dimension Data. We ourselves are a cloud provider. We are also a very large systems integrator. We know both sides of the coin. There are very few companies that do both. We are talking to clients with a lot of empathy. We can tell them that we able to offload a lot of their headaches. For instance, legal concerns, infrastructure management, other services. Those kinds of pain points exist in every client.