Roundtable: How to build a private cloud

The middle of the sandwich

CRN: We've got two resellers here - Mark Illot from Anittel and Craig Somerville from the Somerville Group. Do you see resellers' role being the middle of the sandwich?

Mark Illot, Anittel: Well that's effectively what we've always been but it's perhaps becoming more obvious from a hardware point of view now in that we either own it or fully manage it, whether it sits on premise or in our data centres or in someone else's data centres.

In the SMB space, which is typically where we play, they're not asking us for cloud, they're asking us to take these problems away. Many of them are just absolutely sick of buying hardware - and I know there's obviously a few vendors here that may not want to hear that - but they're telling us they don't want to do it anymore, they just want that issue to go away, and that's where the cloud is a good fit for them.

Christian Bertolini, APC: Apart from your own infrastructure, would you go to market for those new companies that are providing public cloud services and resell their services?

Illot (pictured below): If we had to. Our choice is always going to be to build our own and that's just where we're at in the market. There are certainly others that will need to resell and sometimes it may be right for us as well.

CRN: It's a big ask, a partner buying all the hardware for a customer to rent back?

Illot: Well it is, yeah, and for many resellers it's not going to be possible for them to be buying their own hardware and doing that. So there are obviously going to be other providers out there that resell that hardware, that cloud service, that on-demand service to resellers and then on to the end-users.

George: Also from the resellers' point of view it becomes more complex because the more diversity they have in the product offering, the more certifications and things like that they need to keep up and that takes a significant amount of resources in terms of people, training time, certification time, because you need that to be able to manage and service the equipment.

Craig Somerville, The Somerville Group: For those resellers or integrators that are going to build their own infrastructure, to some extent the smart ones are going to partner. I'm not going to become certified in every member's product because it's not valuable for me to do so, the return on investment is not there - but that's not to say I won't host their services in our cloud and we won't deliver them. It's about us partnering.

There was a question about would we use a public cloud provider as a service provider ourselves building infrastructure - if it makes sense, of course we would. We don't build infrastructure if we don't have to.

Building infrastructure is not a trivial task. Any service we invest in or turn on from a cloud perspective has an upfront cost, it has a running cost and a return on investment and each needs to be taken into account.

There's certainly a level of "I don't want to buy it off someone else because that's what we do", but I think we're starting to mature a little bit and go, hang on - at the end of the day, who is the customer? If I'm providing a managed service to a customer then it's not an IBM service or an EMC, it's a Somerville service that we're turning on and delivering to the customer - I'm the one taking the responsibility, I'm the one that holds the T&Cs, so it's my service.

What I underpin that with is my responsibility, I'm the one with the contract.

Next: Private clouds - on premise or hosted?