Dell Channel Star VirtuIT Created Own Private Cloud To Combat AWS -- And It's Working

When public cloud spending started to heat up a few years ago, Michael Murphy, president and founder of solution provider VirtuIT Systems, knew he had to either join or compete with the likes of AWS.

"Amazon and Azure were really competing for the deals that we were in every day," said Murphy, who founded Nanuet, N.Y.-based VirtuIT in 2006 after years of experience with EMC and EqualLogic. "We really were dead set against becoming an AWS partner because I see that, and I still do today, if we partner with them, we're just slowing giving away our business. It might take several years, but eventually we're not going to have any customers."

In late 2015, the all-in Dell Technologies channel partner built its own private cloud on Dell hardware through a partnership with data center custom and colocation specialist 1547 Realty.

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The private cloud offering has since boosted revenue and pipeline for VirtuIT, while increasing deal size opportunity by 20 percent, according to Murphy. The offer is also enabling the solution provider to provide more hybrid solutions wrapped around VirtuIT services.

"We found that these deals are really quite profitable," said Murphy.

VirtuIT's private cloud has helped drive data protection sales and services for the company while at the same time giving customers a way to keep their data closer to their production enviorment. "We offer an easy way to move data back and forth from development to production," Murphy said. "We're beating Amazon's [public cloud] price by 15 to 20 percent."

The company also leverages Dell to chase after new deals.

"So when our Dell counterparts are coming across cloud competitive situations, we can say, 'Hey guys, why don’t we get together on this opportunity?' The Dell team will still get credit for the deal. VirtuIT will then buy the hardware on behalf of the customer and build the offering in the cloud," said Murphy. "The furture is bright."

VirtuIT offers server, storage, networking, security, virtualization, hyper-converged and data protection solutions as hosted solutions or on-premise.