Egenera Debuts White-Label Cloud Platform For Channel Partners

Egenera, a developer of software for provisioning and managing private clouds, Tuesday released a wholesale cloud service intended for channel partners to white-label.

Xterity, the new service, brings Egenera's cloud management technology into Equinix data centers for a hosted IaaS solution that MSPs and solution providers can design as they like, brand as their own and sell at the prices they choose, said Pete Manca, Egenera's CEO.

"We think the timing is right," Manca told CRN. "What we're seeing in the market is MSPs and the reseller channel are looking for an offering they can bring to end users."

[Related: Google Previews New Mobile App For Cloud Management]

The software vendor, based in Boxborough, Mass., has been testing its wholesale cloud model for the past year in Ireland. Irish MSPs during the trial period were using the same technology that Egenera has now deployed in multiple Equinix facilities, leveraging the network-neutral hosting provider's advanced networking capabilities, security and global presence, Manca told CRN.

"We're selling it to managed service providers and Software-as-a-Service companies and they are bringing it to their customers," Manca said. "That's the model we were perfecting over in Ireland and now we are bringing it worldwide."

MSPs can use Xterity to build private, public or hybrid clouds. Egenera currently partners with Amazon Web Services, enabling its channel to sell their self-branded clouds alongside AWS resources, all managed from the same pane of glass. Egenera plans to add Microsoft Azure to the mix sometime in the near future, Manca said.

Xterity was conceived as a "just-add-water cloud" for multitier distribution, Manca told CRN.

"Even resellers of resellers can sell this product. They can set margins, do quoting. That's pretty unique," Manca said. "There's a real void in the market for service providers looking for a true white-label cloud."

Quatro, an MSP based in Philadelphia, has used PAN Cloud Director, the company's hypervisor-agnostic management software, for a few years to manage its own cloud, according to Jim Chebin, the company's owner and CEO.

The new wholesale cloud presents Quatro with an opportunity to achieve geographic diversity and data center redundancy without needing to invest in more equipment and sign leases at additional data centers in other regions.

"It gives us the ability to extend our cloud, the Quatro cloud we have, into their IaaS environment through the same management platform," Chebin told CRN.

While Chebin hasn't yet reviewed the pricing for Xterity so can't say if the service will make financial sense for Quatro, he told CRN it has the potential to displace any business he would conduct with a public cloud provider like AWS or Rackspace to handle spikes in capacity.

"Now we will be able to burst to a similar environment without having to invest in that type of environment somewhere else," Chebin said. "We can actually piggy-back off Xterity's IaaS environment. We could almost instantaneously offer greater geographical presence."

Because the wholesale cloud runs on the same Egenera platform he already uses, it will be easy to seamlessly extend his cloud into multiple data centers, Chebin said.

Manca told CRN that it's up to partners to choose the extent to which they want to self-brand the hosted cloud. They can retain elements of the Xterity branding, or white-label the entire stack.

"What we're offering them is a no-money-down, instant cloud that they can get up and sell to their users. And enterprise quality as well," Manca told CRN.

PUBLISHED APRIL 7, 2015