SoftLayer's Data Center Services Built With Channel In Mind

Company:

Headquarters: Dallas

Technology Sector: Services

Key Product: SoftLayer CloudLayer Computing

Year Founded: 2005

Number of Channel Partners: 2,500-3,000 globally

Ideal Channel Partner: Small Business Focused Solution Provider

Why You Should Care: SoftLayer built its data center services company around its ability to serve solution providers.

The Lowdown: The way George Karidis, chief strategy officer at SoftLayer Inc., sees it, his company isn't going to win solution providers by providing the lowest cost for data center services.

"Pricing is pricing. The [channel strategy] is where we show our biggest differentiation," Karidis said.

When SoftLayer launched four years ago, the company set out right away to white-label all of its data center services to solution providers in order to make the services seamless to end users.

"The reason we did that is because we knew there was a market for resellers. Up until that point, there were few opportunities to take a hosted solution and mask it with something that was not your own infrastructure or data center. We decided up front that that's core to our business," he said.

Early on, SoftLayer made all of its controls and services available through an API to enable partners to integrate its offerings with existing tools and systems, Karidis said.

"It's something that resellers love about us. We don't pretend that SoftLayer is everything underneath it. The [solution providers] make it a solution from end to end," he said.

SoftLayer is geared toward small and midsize businesses, from 25 to 500 employees, Karidis said. An ideal VAR should be "fairly tech savvy," i.e., more than just a reseller of hardware, he added.

"We tend to like folks with some experience in server management. But with our level of automation, almost any fairly technical user can come on in and make it an add-on offering without any hardware commitment," Karidis said.