Entisys360 Disrupts Cloud Services Market With Workspace Cloud For Midmarket Business Transformation
Entisys360 has launched a breakthrough new cloud service that for the first time provides midmarket customers with a multicloud workspace aimed at driving business outcomes.
The new Entisys360 Workspace Cloud is a fully managed subscription-based service that securely delivers midmarket applications for customers in private, public, hybrid and in multicloud IT environments.
The service, which was under development by the Concord, Calif.-based infrastructure/virtualization superstar for more than a year at a cost of more than $1 million, leverages Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure as part of its every cloud strategy.
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Entisys360 CEO Mike Strohl said the new service was built from the ground up to once and for all propel legacy IT-heavy midmarket customers into a full-on "cloud-first" digital transformation securely provisioning and delivering business-outcome-based applications at the same speed as public cloud providers like AWS and Microsoft Azure.
"What we have built is a new platform for midmarket business transformation," said Strohl. "It connects the business all the way out to the true edge – the mobile knowledge worker -- and then in real time provides those users all the tools they need to be more competitive to drive sales growth, while at the same time increasing dramatically the ability to secure the business. It allows midmarket companies to think strategically about how they deliver services to users."
Workspace Cloud, which is powered by technologies from VDI powerhouse Citrix Systems, bests infrastructure- and desktop-as-a-service cloud offerings with a hybrid, multicloud workspace-as-a-service offering.
"Desktop as a service has been here for some time, but what we haven't seen up until now is anybody that has a multicloud platform that is deliverable as a service with all of the business components that we have built into this platform," said Strohl. "The breakthrough was figuring out how to create a platform that worked between clouds and on any cloud. When all you have a hammer, everything is a nail. What we are providing with Workspace Cloud is a full toolbox for midmarket customers. When you have all the tools that we have available to us now, we are able to listen to what customers are looking to accomplish and build those things. What the platform allows us to do is develop more and more components that bring more value to midmarket customers."
Workspace Cloud essentially provides a foundation for Entisys360 to provide customizable workflow automation and application services with a self-service portal for midmarket lines of business. "A customer that is taking advantage of this platform can immediately enable business units to provision and deprovision users," said Strohl. "Midmarket customers want more value from their IT environments, but all the solutions that have been out there prior to this did not allow them to get there. Workspace Cloud gets them there."
The new platform includes multiple layers of automated security that tracks where users are at all times and places specific controls on what business-critical data they can access. "The security implications with this platform are huge," said Strohl. "We are doing a lot of unique things which focus on the behavior of the user. While the user may not be malicious, that is where at many times the breaches occur. This platform minimizes the user's ability to unintentionally breach the system."
The platform also provides midmarket customers the flexibility to target specific users from task worker to knowledge worker to power user or even remote worksation user with flexible software licensing agreements in hybrid cloud environments.
"For customers that already have their own licenses, we can utilize those," said Strohl. "The choice in the past was either use a vanilla service in the public cloud or custom-build it in the enterprise. The private cloud was left out of this. And the hybrid cloud no one has even begun to think about. By building this platform we have created the right financial model, the right security and compliance model, and the right business model. And because it is a platform it can be ported wherever it needs to be ported to for whatever the business reason is."
Even though the platform is customizable, it provides a foundation for future cloud services at a scale that midmarket customers could not achieve on their own, said Strohl. "This is a foundation that we can continue to develop against," he said. "That increases the value to midmarket customers who can not make the same investments in developing and building this out for the future."
Strohl credits Citrix CTP and Entisys360 Practice Lead Dane Young as the technology visionary behind Workspace Cloud. More than a year ago, Strohl green-lighted the project with Young taking the lead on transforming Entisys360 into a cloud services powerhouse. "Dane teamed up with some of our amazingly talented engineers internally and worked with some of our vendor partners to make it happen," he said. "Without Dane we wouldn’t be having this conversation. It is one thing to talk about where you want to go, it is another to create it. This became so much more than I envisioned thanks to Dane. We started with a goal of creating a virtual private cloud with VDI and he turned it into any cloud platform for delivering business outcomes to midmarket customers with VDI as a component."
Among the vendors Young worked with to make Workspace Cloud a reality are Citrix, RES Software and Nvidia.
The new cloud service fundamentally transforms Entisys360 from a data center infrastructure provider to a strategic cloud service provider, said Strohl. "We have moved from selling midmarket customers infrastructure and professional services to becoming a true strategic service provider," he said. "The name of the game is no longer about technology, it is about business outcomes. This platform allows us to bring those business outcomes to midmarket customers."
Workspace Cloud is hosted in three co-located Tier 3 (99.98 percent) and Tier 4 (99.99 percent) rated data centers in California. The Entisys360 model also includes customer data centers and legacy infrastructure or other workloads as a managed service.
The workspace-as-a-service breakthrough has opened the door for new sales channels with other cloud service providers looking to resell the services, said Strohl. "We are finding new routes to markets with other channels including service providers," he said. "This unlocks a lot of business opportunities for us. There are a lot of technologies fueling this. This is not just Citrix. I expect to see other manufacturers coming to us wanting to invest to make sure this works on their platform so they can be included as well. In a world of business-outcome-driven solutions, Workspace Cloud is the centerpiece for midmarket business transformation."
Entisys360, in fact, is using the Cloud Workspace to fundamentally transform its own business. The move to Workspace Cloud has taken the company from a capital-expenditure-based IT organization to an operating-expense-based model. "From a cost standpoint we longer have to spend all that money up front for IT," he said. "That means we no longer have IT equipment depreciation to deal with."
The cloud services model has also brought a new entrepreneurial spirit and drive to the organization, said Strohl. "That's bringing more out-of-the-box thinking to the company," he said. "When we saw what Dane and the team created and saw what a big impact it was having in the market, we knew we wanted it for our own organization."
Strohl said the sales pipeline for the new service is growing fast with sales projections at tens of millions of dollar over the course of the next year. "We are moving forward at light speed," he said. "This is super exciting. This is the best I have ever felt about the business. It was really hard to get here. We are coming through the finish line of transforming our business and everybody knows that the transformation that VARs need to go through is hard if not impossible."