CEO Dupler: GreenPages Is Reinventing Itself, Upping Its Application Game As Cloud Market Moves Into Overdrive

GreenPages CEO Ron Dupler Monday told 150 IT executives that his company is "reinventing" itself – stepping up its application and software layer offensive – as the cloud computing market disrupts businesses at an ever-faster rate.

"Almost all of the transformation and disruption we see is being driven by software and the application layer," said Dupler in a call to action for IT leaders to compete with conviction and disrupt rather than be disrupted. "Legacy infrastructure is broke. It is not fast enough. If you have legacy IT, you are running a race with an anchor on your back compared to these new disruptive companies leveraging new technologies."

GreenPages, which was at the forefront of the channel shift to capture the cloud computing wave, is responding with a charge to scale up its application and software practices. "We are reinventing everything from our partner ecosystem to our delivery ecosystem," said Dupler.

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Kittery, Maine-based GreenPages, No. 195 on the 2016 CRN Solution Provider 500, is forging relationships with a new class of cloud-focused application vendors including AppDynamics and Puppet and even pursuing a strategic relationship with Amazon Web Services.

Dupler predicted that the percentage of workloads running on public cloud architectures like AWS will soar from 15 percent to 40 percent over the next three to five years. "AWS right now is the biggest disruptive force in the industry today," he said.

Dupler said he sees a big opportunity to help IT operations staffs bring AWS "mainstream" with a "cohesive management fabric that encompasses" both on-premise and public cloud.

The GreenPages application march comes with the "on-premise infrastructure market shrinking dramatically," said Dupler. "There is less of that work for solution providers and hardware-centric engineers. The question is: ’What does the future look like for GreenPages and the channel?’"

GreenPages must be more focused on "architecting best-of-breed service platforms that support applications, data and agility," said Dupler. "We have got to be very application-centric because that is where the value takes place. We look at ourselves as one of the channel players making the investments to turn the ship."

The GreenPages application drive will be leveraged in both the company's technology architecture and managed services teams, said Dupler. "This is about supporting application availability and application performance for end users. That game is different than where our industry has played in the past."

Although GreenPages has had an application practice, Dupler said customers will see a much more direct focus on application performance management.

Traditional solution providers are under intense competitive pressure as the cloud market hits a "G-Force" level with many customers balking at traditional on-premise solutions, said Dupler. "There is a lot of fear, uncertainty and doubt with a lot of inertia as customers try to sort things out," he said. "At the same time, there is a lot of promise ahead, but it looks much different than what we have done over the last five years."

GreenPages’ Transformation Services offensive, which was launched 16 months ago to help companies accelerate their move to more innovative and agile technology, is now the "tip of the spear in everything we do as an organization," said Dupler. "It is all about digital transformations enabled by applications and applications agility."

The digital transformation imperative has created "pent-up" demand for productivity projects as customers shift their focus from traditional infrastructure to digital transformation, said Dupler.

The core issue for companies with legacy IT is that in order to compete with a new class of competitors that are disrupting their business, they need to "re-rationalize" that legacy infrastructure to make it more agile, said Dupler.

Even conservative customers that once balked at moving aggressively to the cloud are moving quickly to transform their business to enable "agility and innovation," he said. "It is no longer a front of the bell curve phenomenon. It is now at the back end of the bell curve. We see conservative customers that were dragging their feet on cloud and next-generation computing platforms are now pursuing next-generation cloud strategies."