This week was all about wheelings and dealings in the managed services space. As MSPs jockey for position they are forging partnerships, buying out other companies or being acquired by bigger fish and generally drawing lines in the sand to establish friend from foe. It made for some interesting announcements in the ever-evolving market.
CoreOS has formed a deal to acquire Quay.io for undisclosed terms. The company offers a custom Linux OS that drives the open Docker container system for distributed applications, while Quay deals in private Docker repositories. Since CoreOS is planning to debut an Enterprise Registry tool for its CoreOS Managed Linux service, the Quay.io solution could greatly enhance its offerings.
Amazon continues to strengthen its toehold in the infrastructure space announcing an expanded relationship with XO Communications this week. XO is providing additional dedicated connections to AWS with speeds of 50 to 500 Mbps through the AWS Direct Connect program. The connections are geared toward smaller enterprises and companies that may not need connection speeds of one to 10 Gbps. AWS is accessed directly through the XO IP-VPN, offering a secure private on-ramp to the public cloud.
Amazon also made another strategic move this week, providing an undisclosed amount of funding to Acquia, a digital marketing company. Acquia is an AWS customer, using the infrastructure for service delivery via Drupal. The company will use the funds to speed development of its big data marketing, commerce and personalization solutions along with a recent $50 million financing round from New Enterprise Associates.
Extreme Networks and Blue Door Networks have teamed up to offer a full mix of their solutions to MSP DataChambers. The service provider will be using the offerings to upgrade and expand its customer offerings while also improving its network scalability and reliability. Extreme is contributing a data center solution complete with intelligent switches for virtualization and converged storage while Blue Door specializes in managed communications and IT services.
In pretty exciting technology news, some veterans from VMware have formed a new private cloud management company called Platform9 along with a brand new SaaS platform. The solution basically takes a customer’s existing servers and transforms them into a private cloud featuring all the agility and features of a public cloud, within minutes. The platform offers single pane of glass management of VMware vSphere along with Docker and KVM for staying on top of a variety of virtualization and container technologies to efficiently allocate workloads.
