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Maximizing Cloud Monetization Opportunities: How MSP Monitoring Can Help

CA’s Ken Vanderweel
Author: Ken Vanderweel

For MSPs around the world, the rapid and widespread adoption of cloud services continues to pose fundamental implications. Business models and markets are being disrupted, with new leaders emerging quickly. By maximizing the number and type of cloud services offered, MSPs can strengthen their competitive position, avoid commoditization and move into rapidly growing markets. For MSPs in the US that are looking to develop or expand their cloud plays, it may pay to look east for ideas.

While there are big discrepancies among individual countries, in general, many regions within the Asia Pacific region have been moving rapidly into the cloud. There’s a lot of sophistication in those markets, both among customers and MSPs, which is helping accelerate the adoption and expansion of cloud computing technologies.

The Asia Cloud Computing Association (ACCA) publishes a Cloud Readiness Index, ranking countries in Asia based on a variety of criteria, such as international connectivity, cybersecurity and more. The most recent report rated Hong Kong, Singapore and New Zealand as the first to third leading countries, respectively. The report included a sample of non-Asian markets for comparative analysis, showing that Asian countries remain in leading positions, with the UK and Germany ranked third and the US ranked fifth.

I’ve been fortunate to speak with three partners in Asia recently, and I found that each business offers compelling examples of the possibilities for MSPs in the cloud. These partners show that monitoring platforms can play a significant role in powering cloud services, providing a variety of services far beyond the traditional focus on tracking system status.

Following are profiles of three partners in Asia that are harnessing monitoring to deliver compelling, innovative cloud services.


Bespin Global

Company Background

Bespin Global provides a range of services with a singular focus: Helping customers be successful in the cloud. The company offers services that support customers before, during and after their moves to the cloud. Bespin had its beginnings as a division in Hostway, a company that’s been in the managed hosting space since 1998 and that’s operating 11 data centers today. Ultimately, the division that was focused on cloud offerings saw so much growth, they decided to spin it off, and so Bespin Global was launched.

Monitoring-powered Services

Here’s a sample of the monitoring-powered services that Bespin Global delivers:

  • Hybrid environment monitoring. Bespin Global offers comprehensive monitoring of customer environments, including physical servers in Hostway’s data center and in their in-house server rooms, private clouds on customers’ premises, public cloud services like AWS and Azure—and combinations of all these environments. The company delivers a common data set for developers, migration project managers, operators and others, enabling fast response when issues arise.
  • Hybrid workload management and migration. Because they’ve established a platform that unites the monitoring and management of cloud and on-premises workloads, they can deliver holistic perspectives that enable customers to make the most informed decisions about where and when to migrate workloads.
  • Application performance management. Bespin Global gives customers deep visibility into application responsiveness and throughput through APM services, allowing them to gain the insights they need to optimize the user experience.
  • Asset management. For many businesses, existing asset management systems aren’t well equipped to make the move from physical to virtual assets, and so they don’t work well in cloud environments. To address this challenge, Bespin Global leverages its monitoring platform to track and manage virtual machines and instances. Through these services, the company provides an accurate, real-time picture of all cloud assets.
  • Log analysis. Through analysis of logs generated, Bespin Global provides visibility into system and service usage. As a result, customers can more effectively monitor and improve their products and services.
  • Cloud usage tracking. Bespin Global can track cloud usage, which can help clients ensure they’re being billed accurately. Further, customers can more intelligently manage their cloud investments, so they’re optimally aligned with evolving workloads.

The company also developed the Bespin Service Platform, a cloud-based platform customers can use to access a variety of services, including infrastructure monitoring, application performance monitoring, service desk and workflow management, asset management, log analysis and more. Bespin Global also offers its customers various prepackaged dashboards and reports, and it delivers dashboards tailored to engineers as well as to financial staff and C-level executives.


Fujitsu Singapore

Company Background

Fujitsu Singapore is dedicated to helping its customers pursue their digital business transformation initiatives, delivering managed services across four key areas: cloud services, managed security services, end-user services and data center services.

Through the company’s MetaArc framework, Fujitsu Singapore provides a platform that helps customers establish a bridge between new and old IT, between traditional legacy systems and modern approaches that support digitization, Internet of Things (IoT), big data and other initiatives.

The company delivers hosting and cloud services, such as virtual-machine-as-a-service offerings. With these services, their teams take care of all customer equipment, including storage systems, servers and networking devices.

Monitoring-powered Services

Fujitsu Singapore relies on their monitoring platform for a variety of efforts:

  • Monitoring hosted and cloud environments. Operations teams conduct status and performance monitoring of their data center environment to ensure their hosting and cloud services are meeting service-level commitments.
  • Monitoring of virtual machine services. Fujitsu Singapore offers operational monitoring services, so customers can track availability and performance of these environments.
  • IT Management as a Service. The company’s FUJITSU Cloud IT Management as a Service offering, which is a suite of SaaS-based applications, includes the FUJITSU Cloud Monitoring Service. Powered by their monitoring platform, this cloud-based service features broad environment coverage and sophisticated analytics and reporting. This service makes it easy for customers to leverage the monitoring capabilities they need—without having to deploy, manage or support internal monitoring platforms.

Net One Systems

Company Background

Net One Systems has an extensive background in information and communications technologies. Today, the company is focused on effectively managing and supporting customers’ complex, multivendor environments, which include on-premises infrastructures, private cloud services and hybrid cloud environments. When their customers need to expand capabilities, they invariably go to the cloud. Net One Systems is helping customers to adapt to and capitalize on these new realities. The company offers these services:

  • Cloud builder services. The company helps with integrating public and private clouds, establishing VDI and deploying networks. Staff members are using VMware and OpenStack to automate private clouds.
  • Cloud broker services. Net One Systems enables customers to connect safely to public clouds, such as those offered by AWS and Azure, while assisting with corporate governance, authentication and security and service policies. In addition, they offer a hub as a service that customers can use to securely access their public cloud services.

Monitoring-powered Services

Net One Systems helps customers maintain their cloud environments and ensure they deliver performance and service levels as required. The company offers the following services:

  • Cloud usage monitoring, capacity planning. Net One Systems helps customers more effectively track and manage their usage, while also offering historical intelligence that enables customers to do more informed planning and resource investment.
  • Advanced dashboards and reporting. The company offers monitoring and visualization of customers’ complex, multivendor environments and hybrid implementations, including cloud services, networking devices, software, virtualized systems, virtual desktop infrastructures and more. Through their portals, they provide direct, on-demand access to monitoring data, so customers can see status any time. They also provide a mix of standard and custom monitoring reports and incident reporting services.
  • Support of IoT and DevOps initiatives. Through its expertise and technologies, Net One Systems is supporting customers’ expanding use of IoT, for example, to do factory automation. Their monitoring services also support customers who are pursuing DevOps initiatives in the cloud.
  • End-user experience and service level monitoring. The company leverages its monitoring platform to track and report on the end-user experience, and to establish and track performance against SLAs. With these insights, the company can help customers maximize business continuity, and, if a problem occurs, make sure that it gets resolved as quickly as possible.

Conclusion

In this age of digital disruption, MSPs will need to adapt to today’s new cloud realities, or risk losing market share to those who do. Many MSPs in Asia are leading the way in monetizing the cloud. By harnessing their sophisticated monitoring platforms and expertise, these and many other MSPs will be well equipped to offer customers compelling cloud-focused services, so they can capitalize on growing markets.

To learn more about each of the MSPs profiled above, including details on their businesses and some of the keys to their success, be sure to download “CA Unified Infrastructure Management: Profiles in Partner Success, APJ Edition.”


Ken Vanderweel is senior director of service provider solutions marketing at CA Technologies. Read more CA blogs here.