Networking News
Aviatrix’s Steve Mullaney: There’s No Going Back To ‘Cisco Model Of The 90s’
Gina Narcisi
“We’re very picky, actually, about who we work with. If somebody is tied to the old, on-prem world, and selling boxes, we say: ‘Good luck and hold your breath when the boat goes down, because you’re going to get pulled under,’” the company’s CEO Steve Mullaney tells CRN.
Will you be primarily targeting MSPs and partners that pride themselves on their managed services businesses?
Yes, I think that’s the thing that’s going to be the most important part of this -- the MSP part. Every one of our partners want to do MSP because that’s where they’re going to make money.
There are two issues that customers have: there‘s a skills shortage, meaning they don’t really know cloud that well. Maybe they know a little about AWS, but then you start having multiple clouds and they don’t know how to deal with this. Then on top of that, there’s a skills gap. They don’t have the right skills, the right people, or enough people. When we started moving into cloud, the executives at these companies thought they knew cloud; that it was a click and it was easy, so they didn’t need all those people. They could watch their bottom lines and have half the number of people they used to have on-prem[ise]. Now they realize … it’s actually more complicated than on-prem [and] they don’t really understand it as much or have enough people. I think they’re going to reach out [for help], but we don’t want that. That’s not our business. We want to sell software [and] we will do professional services to help our customers, but the ultimate goal is to empower our partners to take on that function. That’s a big thing we’re kicking off right now -- I think we’ll have thousands of MSPs around the world and I think that’s going to be a huge part of our business. And it will all be based on the Aviatrix software.
