Managed Service Provider Week in Review

A variety of key partnerships and buyout announcements comprised this week’s managed services headlines. As the cloud becomes more and more entrenched in the MSP world, service providers are looking for ways to improve their efficiencies while quickly rolling out an increasing number of valuable managed offerings.

Windstream Hosted Solutions, a provider of cloud and managed hosting services, teamed up with SaaS provider Racemi this week. The companies are working together to help enterprises migrate locally hosted data to Windstream’s cloud servers. Proprietary Racemi Cloud Path SaaS software will be used to manage the data transfers.

A management buyout of London-based Connect Communications, a unified communications provider, has been announced by Lloyds Development Capital. The move has Lloyds investing in growing Connect to become a more than $150 million managed IT services business. Entrepreneur Alex Tupman is leading the buyout and will become CEO of Connect when the deal is finished.

FiberLight, which provides fiber-optic-based networking services to telecom carriers, content providers, government and enterprises, has partnered with Cirracore. The latter company is a supplier of VMware-based cloud IaaS solutions. The companies will work together to offer IaaS for business continuity and disaster recovery at FiberLight’s facilities in Atlanta and Dallas with additional deployments planned for later in the year.

IaaS cloud provider Peak has been chosen to power Komodo Cloud’s platform. The Peak cloud will be used as the foundation for Komodo’s applications and managed services, including IT consulting and a variety of managed offerings. Peak, which offers cloud nodes in Atlanta, Chicago, Denver, London, New York, New Jersey, Santa Clara and Seattle, enables service providers and resellers to white label their cloud services and enter the market without any capital expenditures required.