GreenPages' Cloud Management Service Is Gaining Momentum

GreenPages Technology Solutions CEO Ron Dupler Monday said that more than 120 customers are already running the company's breakthrough Cloud Management as a Service (CMaaS) platform.

"We are seeing a tremendous thirst and need in the market to rationalize and help integrate public cloud and manage across public and private clouds," Dupler told 110 IT professionals in his keynote address at the SP500 technology service powerhouse's 17th annual technology summit at the Sheraton Harborside in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. "Our future is about hybrid cloud enablement."

Dupler has made the GreenPages CMaaS product, which was brought to market in January, the centerpiece of an ambitious five-year plan to build a $300 million business. He forecasts CMaaS will grow at an astronomical 857 percent rate over the next five years. That is expected to drive GreenPages annuity-based services from just $7 million today to $60 million in 2018.

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"We are showing customers what it means to be a consulting and integration firm in the hybrid cloud era," said Dupler. "We want to be the best hybrid cloud era consulting and integration firm."

The demand for the CMaaS offering is so great that GreenPages has set up its LogicsOne consulting and virtualization organization as a separate brand to make the GreenPages CMaaS platform available to other solution providers, ISVs and OEMs through a LogicsOne model.

"Our message to them is we are open for business and want to speak with them," said Dupler. "You have companies stuck in the traditional solution provider space today, and they don't have the wherewithal to move their customers to the hybrid cloud. We can provide them a fast path to the hybrid cloud world with consulting, management and integration across both the public and private cloud worlds."

LogicsOne is already working with large and small solution provider organizations looking to add hybrid cloud enablement to their services mix said Dupler. The GreenPages CMaaS momentum comes with intense cost pressures on traditional IT driving a massive shift of corporate workloads to public clouds, said Dupler in an address titled "The New Normal: The Big Shift Is Underway."

Some customers are going so far as looking to move everything to the public cloud, whereas other customers are moving more slowly, looking at applications on a case-by-case basis, said Dupler.

One sign of the public cloud momentum: IT professionals see 50 percent of IT workloads moving to a public cloud in three to five years, according to a survey by market research firm IDC in 2012. That's a big change from 2011 when IT professionals expected only 30 percent of IT workloads to move to the public cloud during that same period.

Kittery, Maine-headquartered GreenPages, No. 153 on CRN's Solution Provider 500 with $110 million in annual sales, has made a massive multimillion dollar investment over the last five years to help customers move to the cloud. Now GreenPages is focused squarely on helping those customers manage hybrid cloud environments.

NEXT: GreenPages Next Cloud Management Move: A Brokerage And Governance Service

The next step in GreenPages' hybrid cloud enablement offensive is adding a new brokerage and governance platform to its CMaaS offering.

The new brokerage and governance offering, which is based on technology from Gravitant, an Austin, Texas, cloud brokerage software provider, allows customers to quickly compare the cost of deploying workloads in competing public clouds including Amazon Web Services, Terremark, Savvis and GoGrid.

GreenPages is already piloting the brokerage and governance service and plans to make it generally available in the fourth quarter. "The big surprise to me is the velocity with which we have people banging down the doors for this [cloud brokerage service]," said GreenPages' Dupler. "We already have three customers in PoC [proof-of-concept] mode."

That CMaaS toolset gap is especially prevalent in the midmarket where customers can not afford legacy services platforms from the likes of IBM, CA and HP and are looking for affordable alternatives from cloud specialists like GreenPages, said Dupler. He said the legacy management platforms have traditionally been focused on the "upper end of the market," leaving midmarket customers out in the cold.

What's more, many of those legacy IT services providers are acquiring companies to fill the hybrid cloud management gap and then running into the difficult task of integrating a new hybrid cloud enablement platform, said Dupler. "That becomes a nightmare of management tools," he said.

Beyond the technology muscle that GreenPages brings to the CMaaS market, the secret to the company's growing momentum is the "people and processes" behind the service, said Dupler.

"Our GreenPages' people and processes are the true differentiators," he said. "Talent is the key to this. Great technology companies are built upon great teams of people and skilled technologists. That is core to everything we do."

Dupler told Summit attendees that GreenPages' ability to provide hybrid cloud enablement as an "agnostic" consulting and services provider sets it apart from both traditional solution providers with a vested interest in selling legacy solutions and born-in-the-cloud providers committed to moving all workloads to the public cloud.

"We are walking in today with a great team of architects and a business model that allows us to step back, analyze your application portfolio and really build an optimal service architecture for your organization," he told the IT professionals. "There is no single [public or private cloud] answer. We need to look at your IT environment, assess it, look at your biases and your business, compliance requirements, application portfolio and select the best venue across private and public cloud. That is what we do today. This isn't easy or for the faint of heart. But, we are up to the challenge and psyched to be doing it!"

PUBLISHED AUGUST 5, 2013