There is no stopping the momentum of cloud computing. Yesterday at the Avnet Canada conference in North Toronto the distributor brought up an excellent speaker, Rick Villars of IDC, to inform the channel partners in attendance about IT transformation.
What is the top reason for this IT transition? The cloud!
On the heels of this revelation, another distributor, Arrow ECS, announced a line of cloud services for the Canadian market place. These cloud services will be branded Arrow Fusion and will be part of its professional services unit.
These new services include: data centre monitoring and management, security, SaaS, infrastructure-as-a-service, and business continuity or disaster recovery.
I’m sure all these services are great, but what’s the difference between Fusion and a regular set of managed services? If you go to any MSP they too will provide monitoring and management, security and business continuity.
Is the SaaS and IaaS the cloud part? According to Arrow, Fusion SaaS will include security for e-mail and Web along with messaging archiving and a subscription to Microsoft hosted Exchange and Sharepoint. Again, that’s all great, but Microsoft has been offering this via distributors for some time now.
The IaaS services look from the outside to be capacity on demand, which again is a managed service.
There is no mention of access to public clouds or setting up a private cloud for customers.
Arrow Fusion fals short in this area because this is what the market place is asking solution providers for.
Westcon Group’s security business practice has been awarded Distributor of the Year by Check Point Software at an event in Las Vegas.