Verizon's Secure Cloud Interconnect Available to Partners

By Ellen Muraskin

CLOUD PARTNERS — When I first met Janet Schijns, chief marketing technologist for Verizon Enterprise Solutions, at the Women in the Channel event just before Cloud Partners, she was in sisterly cheerleading mode. Wednesday was just a little different. She showed no less enthusiasm, but this time was meeting to talk business; specifically, the partner availability of Verizon’s Secure Cloud Interconnect ramp to cloud services. 

The service is aimed at getting customers over their Fear of Cloud; specifically what hit migration might take on their application performance and security. It’s also for those companies, like most, accessing more than one cloud service and needing one view into, and control over, bandwidth consumption.

Verizon’s answer is its private IP network, through which workloads can run to Verizon’s own cloud services, or Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, Equinix data centers, Coresite, Salesforce.com, HP Helion Managed Cloud Service, and more to follow. It’s also the solution that gives the channel something digitally relevant and current, says Schijns, to take to the table.  She goes further, calling it the biggest moneymaking opportunity that partners will see in the next year.

If customers want the option of connecting via public IP addresses, say for the back end of company websites, they have that option. For partners who have developed their own SaaS, in health care, say, or point-of-sale, they can literally tie it with the Secure Cloud Interconnect bow. PCI compliance, HIPAA compliance, and end-to-end connectivity are built in.

Pre-integrated Connections to Popular Clouds Speed Deployment

Beth Cohen, product manager for Secure Cloud Interconnect, notes that Verizon has done the IP edge router deployment in 30 locations to pre-provision on the CSP end. After an enterprise customer selects its cloud services, location and service information, Verizon automatically provisions the connections in minutes or hours, instead of the days or weeks previously required.

Secure Cloud Interconnect works over Verizon’s wireless network as well, to mobile devices or fixed endpoints. As an example, Cohen mentions a utility’s installation of wireless meters, whose readings travel over the private IP network on their way to Verizon Enterprise’s GridWise power utility cloud. 

“Partners don’t have to do capacity planning; they have dynamic bandwidth. They have access to [up to] a 10G network, and like the cloud itself, they only pay for what they use,” said Cohen. Customers or partners can see their connections on the Verizon Console. They can make changes, or bring connections down temporarily. All they actually need is …

… one VPN on the private IP network. If they just want to make Secure Cloud Interconnect connections, it doesn’t have to be a real VPN,” says Cohen.

Cutting Their Teeth on SDN

“Whether we’re selling network or cloud, this product lets partners have a relevant conversation with the customer about security as well as performance,” said Schijns. It also lets customers as well as partners “cut their teeth in SDN [software-defined networking].” Provisioning is all done online. Bandwidth is dynamically allocated between applications. (Watch this space for SDN workshops to be held at Channel Partners’ fall show in Las Vegas.)

Cohen said that 80 percent of all customers who move to cloud end up re-architecting their networks, presenting more opportunity. Schijns followed that by noting rich commissions at the top level of partnership, and “sell-with” models for systems-integrator partners. Agents can start selling today and receive commissions next month.

Cohen notes that six months into release, the typical purchase pattern is that customers buy one SCI connection to one cloud service and then come back for more. That typical customer then grows to ten to 20 connections within three or four months. For more information, go to the Verizon partner program portal. And if it’s not too late, come to the Fastball event Thursday in the Hynes Convention Center’s Ballroom B at 10 a.m., to hear Beth Cohen in her own words.

Finally, Schijns wanted to remind Cloud Partners attendees that Verizon is still honoring its current partner level with competing carriers, should they join the carrier’s Partner Advantage program. Such partners will begin enjoying the same metal level’s commissions and benefits through Verizon without starting over.  She also announced that Verizon has “a substantial amount of market-development funds to have the right demand generation tools as partners look to move customers to the cloud.”