The Cloud has thrown up some interesting go-to-market models in recent times. From joint ventures such as Microsoft’s with telco AT&T – whose customers can have VPN access to the Azure Cloud – to new marketplaces designed to offer third-party applications created by traditional technology and service players from Dell to VMware. It is all part of finding new ways of capturing the Cloud market for all involved – vendor, app developer, telco, tech consultancies and service provider. And in many cases the new alliances being formed are as much about branding as they are about the technology that underpins the Cloud.

Last year global systems integrator Dimension Data – which operates 11 global data centers designed for delivering cloud services – made a market shift that pushes its cloud focus towards brand equity. Much like the Star Alliance or One World for air travellers, which focusses on vetted partnerships (in Dimension Data’s case with tech player Cisco) it is entering new geographies through carefully selected partnerships with service providers. It is doing this by offering them reference architectures for clouds based on its own cloud service that it claims can be rolled out in 16 weeks with Dimension Data and Cisco-designed technology and processes. The move allows Dimension Data to increase its own cloud footprint into geographies it wouldn’t usually establish a data center in and allows partners access to its own global footprint and that of other alliance members.

The three-pronged relationship (Dimension Data, Cisco and partner) also secures technology sales for the vendor itself. The OneCloud partnership already has alliances in Indonesia and India and last year it signed up JT (previously Jersey Telecom) which operates in the Channel Islands, a region with two independent governing jurisdictions (Guernsey and Jersey) in the English Channel. Once a partner is signed up for a geography that location is crossed off the list, according to Dimension Data, which plans on having only around 30 alliance partners for One Cloud once the program is complete.

The JT story
JT managing director Paul Taylor says the telco, which places a large emphasis on data sovereignty when selling services (different laws apply for Guernsey and Jersey) was already in talks with Cisco about building out its own cloud before choosing to join the alliance. “It was a long process. We looked at the ownership model with various manufacturers and went through a tender process. We were trying to get to market fast and it was painful. We realised this wasn’t just about the platform. The processes following were important too. We had to marry process with technology well to delivery Tier 1 cloud services and doing it ourselves was going to slow us down,” says Taylor.

The contract JT signed with Dimension Data covers two OneCloud offerings for – one for each jurisdiction – for five years. It includes technology built using the OneCloud reference architecture as well as support structures, staff processes, risk assessment and marketing strategies and innovation roadmaps.

“We could take white boxes and then adapt everything for each jurisdiction with our own branding. It was a whole end-to-end package,” Taylor says. “One thing we have found really useful is the TCO tools we have with this. We can look at a customer’s strategy for a one- to five-year period for hardware replacements, enter data about on-premise hardware including where maintenance agreements lay and the software customers are running. This churns out various support scenarios to see if moving a customer to the Cloud will be cost and performance efficient.”

When customers want to have a global footprint they can expand using the broader OneCloud footprint using JT’s fiber network “which is important for us dealing with financial services as a Tier 1 telco” Taylor says. It also means a company in South Africa, for example, could use the alliance to start selling services in the Channel Islands through JT’s own cloud.

The OneCloud sell
Part of the sell for OneCloud is the fact that it offers ‘network centric’ Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS). For JT this means customers govern their own cloud.

“It is really up to them how they manage it,” said Taylor. Standardized APIs allowing for flow monitoring are built into the platform. Customers can spin up environments as and when they please without going through change control processes and consumption is all charged back on a utility-based model set at the provider’s discretion.

Dimension Data promotes the network-centric cloud as being a key part of this offering. “For JT the network-centric cloud is about the assurance of service, SLAs and delivery of application – the app is only as good as the network it travels on,” says Taylor.

But Cisco regional sales manager for the UK Jo Laking says the sale goes much further than this. OneCloud has also been designed on the premise that customers still care about what is upholding the structure of the Cloud service.

“It goes back to assurance of quality. With IaaS we still find people what to know what is at the back end, be it an Intel processor or Cisco server,” said Laking. “We sell cloud to people from an IT background, so it really is how you approach these things. You have to bring these people on this journey with you, which means it is about a consultative approach.” With this in mind, the role Cisco plays goes beyond being a technology partner.

“It is about JT being able to leverage the Cisco brand but we also work with JT and Dimension Data on services development and innovation. This is really about how you package things together and then market them, driving value in relationships,” says Laking. “We now see a lot of partners not necessarily wanting to build whole clouds themselves but partner, be they system integrators, traditional telcos or hosting companies. There are lots of different ways this is happening.”

What Cisco is worried about, according to Laking, is “the cloud becoming a pervasive dumping ground”. “You need the right partnerships, we are finding, to help you along that journey”.

For JT, this help, however, comes at a cost. Joining the alliance means that Dimension Data and Cisco are contractually obliged to meet demand as the JT cloud grows. But it also means JT has to provide capacity and bandwidth on its network to meet the growing needs of the alliance.

But JT can now do this all under the Dimension Data OneCloud brand.

This article first appeared in FOCUS issue 34. To read the full digital edition, click here. Or download a copy for the iPad from DCDFocus.