GreenPages Ups Ante In Cloud Computing Services With Private Label Cloud

GreenPages CEO Ron Dupler Monday told about 100 CIO attendees at the company's 15th annual Technology Solutions Summit that the Kittery, Maine-headquartered company is going to become a "private label cloud" provider.

Dupler said that will entail layering value-added technologies on top of the cloud that will provide GreenPages' customers with additional business agility and flexibility along with business grade service level agreements that are more sophisticated than any of the offerings from telecommunications services giants.

To that end, GreenPages intends to announce in several weeks a "data bus" solution that will allow customers to safely move data from in-house applications to enterprise hybrid and public clouds and a cloud computing management-as-a-service offering that can be purchased as a monthly service.

The GreenPages' private label cloud offering represents a throw down of sorts against telecommunciations services giants which some faster and more nimble solution providers acting as cloud builders view as a competitive threat.

Dupler, for his part, said that telecommunications services providers are vying for "trusted advisor status" in the race to provide cloud computing services. "They believe they will ultimately be able to step in and give you guys the Holy Grail," Dupler told CIOs at the conference which is titled, "Cloudscape. Consquences, Opportunities & the New Reality."

Dupler said that "Holy Grail" of cloud computing services that the telecommunications service providers are aiming to deliver is "probably not true" today, but they believe they "are going to be able to get there."

GreenPages, which has been recognized with numerous awards for its virtualization and cloud prowess, is making deeper investments aimed at helping customers make the journey to the cloud, said Dupler.

GreenPages Chief Technology Officer John Ross said the company's data bus offering is a programming interface that will move data efficiently into applications, providing what amounts to data redundancy for customers concerned about moving their data to private or public clouds. "I have been personally running this for nine months internally," Ross said. "I guarantee it works."

As for the cloud computing services management offering from GreenPages, Ross said, that is critical because it will provide customers an "internal" and "external" view of enterprise hybrid private and public clouds.

Providing that cloud management as a monthly service will allow customers to forego as much as a $2.5 million investment in the software and services bought outright from a software vendor like BMC or Computer Associates, said Ross.

Ross said that those CIOs and information technology executives that think their own business units are not using public cloud offerings like Amazon Web Services are fooling themselves. He pointed to recent reports from several analysts that Amazon's cloud computing services business could soon break the $1 billion barrier.

When Ross asked the 100-plus CIOs how many were monitoring their internal networks to see if any business units were using Amazon Web Services, only two CIOs raised their hands.

"Nobody else here is tracking that?" asked Ross. "I guarantee more people at your locations are consuming cloud computing using Amazon or (Microsoft) Azure than you realize."