‘MSP’ is not a word one hears often in a sentence with the word ‘NetApp.’ So when did NetApp and your organization in particular realize that you had something for MSPs?

So CloudJumper has always actually been focused on powering up the MSP. They initially did that with a software model, and then they moved to a services model and colocation. But it was when they were acquired by NetApp that the cloud, the public cloud opportunity with Azure Cloud, came into focus. And with the opportunity NetApp saw with the CloudJumper acquisition, they actually acquired another company called CloudCheckr. And that company was almost exclusively focused on the MSP market.

NetApp has always had a reseller relationship with the market and a really broad array of resellers from the more traditional storage side of the business. And Spot PC and CMX [end-to-end cloud management platform] from CloudCheckr are the two product areas that are really targeting and making great progress and connecting with more MSPs. I think the CMX platform has more than 100 MSPs. Spot PC has almost 200 MSPs on our technology.

Is there any overlap between the two?

Very little.

Are there cross-sell opportunities between them?

Yes, absolutely. What’s interesting about the CMX model is that they’re focused on helping the MSP community manage cost out of all the infrastructure that they’re helping deploy and manage. We’re just focused on the desktops. So that’s where we are very targeted. And NetApp chose to take on the financial risk of the optimization just to simplify life in the desktop space because it can be very dynamic, depending on if you’re using a shared environment where multiple users are on a single VM or dedicated VMs. Or now we are issuing desktops that have GPUs, or even multiple GPUs in a single desktop, for technical users. So we chose to take on the complexity and the risk of doing that so that the MSP community can have a really predictable cost experience with that kind of solution.