A quick search of the current technology trends for this year and beyond reveals much of what we expect: the accelerated rate of digitisation in business and society, together with ever-increasing data volumes, have customers asking for stability, security, backup and redundancy, which are reliable and can scale. It’s a complicated task for any organisation.

The legendary Formula 1 commentator Murray Walker once said: “The lead car is absolutely unique, except for the one behind it, which is identical,” many managed service providers (MSP) are discovering specialising in the same solutions and providing the same cloud solutions from Azure, AWS or any of the other hyperscalers, poses another challenge.

When MSPs offer similar solutions, they begin competing on price and risking margin. And the simplicity with which the customer can switch service providers places MSPs and their business at further risk.

The business of cloud, hybrid and multi-cloud is poised to become big business. If it is not on a customer’s technology roadmap yet, it will be soon. For clients of MSPs, cloud solutions for storage, network and processing mean costs and risks of setting up expensive infrastructure to try out new ideas are heavily mitigated. Hybrid solutions, for when public cloud services aren’t suitable, have also matured to the point where they can provide a ‘best of both’ solution.

In much the same way that hardware resellers became MSPs in the late 90s and early 2000s by growing their business by offering additional hardware, software and networking support services to customers, today’s MSPs are going to grow by being able to understand how to leverage the cloud in their client’s environments and offering a unique selling point. Unfortunately, offering the same solution as other MSPs and systems integrators is not it.

Microsoft partners are a dime a dozen, and its Azure services are an easy sell into many organisations, but they do not come without their own challenges. Sporadic outages, little support and surprise price increases are not uncommon. For MSPs competing on price, these issues erode what little margin there was in the deal. It shouldn’t be this way. Not in an environment that is in an intense growth phase.

Clients seek value, not the cheapest solution; the challenge for MSPs is how they define what is unique to them and demonstrate their value.  For MSPs, there’s a good margin to be made, too, but it requires that MSPs step out of the perceived Azure (and other hyperscalers) comfort zone to offer a broader range of services. 

Cloud will grow regardless. However, MSPs who offer value will grow exponentially. This may require a little bit of a learning curve to onboard new technology, but what is often found is that cloud operators, like Routed, will provide world-class support to ensure a smooth transition – something which hyperscalers tend to charge additional fees for.

Partnering with an accredited cloud provider is also more sensible than an MSP building its own cloud. In much the same way the client has a relationship with the MSP to provide outsourced technology solutions, Routed is ideally positioned to offer proven vendor-neutral VMware Cloud solutions.

Routed’s Cloud is simple to provision, manages customer workloads, and offers self-service.  And for those with the ability to set up networks, servers, and applications, setting up and managing the cloud for customers will not require a complex new business strategy and resourcing plan.

Having large workloads move to the cloud is inevitable, but unless MSPs carefully consider how they solve this for their clients, they are putting themselves at risk. MSPs are a valuable part of the ecosystem and sit at a crossroads: take the path most travelled and congested with people who look just like them, or choose the other?

The destination might be the same, but the reward will be greater, not only for the MSP, but for the client, too. 

In fact, according to Benjamin Coetzer, Director at vendor-neutral cloud infrastructure provider Routed, containerisation will redefine the cloud.

“Enterprises are embracing containers at a much faster pace than expected. It is completely changing the face of what hybrid cloud looks like, how applications are being built, and containerisation will become a vital skill to possess in most if not all software development roles” he said.

Virtualisation, containerisation and Kubernetes

Back in the day, explains Coetzer, businesses ran applications on physical servers. “It wasn’t possible to define boundaries for the system resources these applications would use, which led to bottlenecks. The only option was to run each application on a different physical server, which quickly become very costly.”

Enter virtualisation – Virtualisation enabled users to run many virtual machines (VMs), each with their allocated applications, on a single physical server. It allows organisations to carve physical resources into more appropriate-sized virtual machines, operating systems like Windows or Linux installed on it.

Containerisation takes it a step further, encapsulating software code that can run uniformly on any infrastructure. Traditionally, code developed in a specific computing environment would have bugs when transferred to a new location – such as from a Linux to a Windows operating system.

A container packages the software away from the host operating system, making it portable and able to run on any platform.

Existing applications can also be repackaged into containers to use computing resources more efficiently. “You can effectively run multiple different applications with multiple different OS versions, on the same virtual machine or physical server without having to worry about one application affecting the other. Though similar to virtual machines, containers have relaxed isolation properties to share the OS with other applications. They’re considered lightweight and share CPU, memory, process space, and more. But they are also portable across clouds and offer a host of benefits – agile application creation and deployment, continuous development, observability, environmental consistency and many more,” says Coetzer.

Of course, all these containers need to be managed, and Kubernetes is the answer. “This rapidly-growing, portable, extensible, open-source platform runs and manages containerised workloads and services at scale. Kubernetes provides the framework to run distributed systems resiliently, handling care of scaling and failover for the application, giving deployment patterns, and much more,” says Coetzer.

Benefits for business

The benefits for developers are clear, and multiple. “Containerisation enables developers to control their application runtime environment much more granularly, ensuring that applications can be built and shipped in a consistent and programmatic manor. This greatly reduces the time to deploy software into production environments and enables the use of CI/CD pipelines in the software development process,” says Coetzer.

“Furthermore, Kubernetes as an orchestration engine lends itself greatly to ideals instilled in microservices architecture, and as a result developers are thinking differently around how applications are built to scale and tolerate service failure in production. Separation of responsibilities means rethinking where stateful data resides and how stateless applications interact with one another.”

When done right, containerisation contributes towards the bottom line through reduced infrastructure costs, fewer workflow interruptions, and faster development and delivery of products, features and upgrades. In the end it ensures better employee and customer satisfaction, which is the ultimate goal of any organisation looking to grow sustainably.

It aims to provide curated resources for partners, managed services providers, and ISPs selling, marketing, and operating as resellers of VMware Cloud through Routed.

Routed became the first VMware Cloud Verified partner in Africa in 2019 and has gone on to become a VMware Principal Partner, too.

Andrew Cruise, managing director for Routed, explains that Routed has built a resilient and robust channel to assist its partners in delivering the best solutions that their end-customers have come to expect from VMware.

“VMware has a discerning customer base with specific requirements of their cloud technologies. Building our Partner Platform has allowed us to curate and focus our efforts on providing our partners with the right tools, material, and support for VMware Cloud presence in Africa through Routed,” says Cruise.

Sumeeth Singh, Cloud Provider Business Head at VMware South Africa, confirms: “Cloud computing solutions are driving the current wave of digital innovation. Through partners like Routed and their channel, we see the acceleration we look forward to, in an age where organisations big and small can benefit from a secure, efficient, and scalable VMware Cloud service delivery platform.”

According to Gartner, spending on the public cloud is forecast to grow over 18% in 2021, with Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) expected to gain the most. Managed Service Providers, ISPs, even ISVs and distribution partners will do well to capitalise on this as organisations’ needs evolve.

The market has already shifted from supply-driven to demand-driven, and it’s become essential for all organisations to consider how the cloud fits into their infrastructure plans.

On-premises infrastructure will always have its place in organisations, especially when more control is required, but it is asset-heavy and slow to adapt to change and growth. For the right use-cases migrating infrastructure to the cloud provides end-customers with agility and cost savings.

Routed depends on partners who can manage the implementation of its solutions, some of the most complete VMware Cloud-based infrastructure deployments available locally.

“The opportunity exists for our partners who, with the right resources, knowledge and support from Routed and VMware, can confidently engage with their end-customers to provide the world-class solutions that VMware is renowned for with the level of support and service that they come to expect,” adds Cruise.

Over the past five years, Routed has established itself as the leading provider of VMware Cloud on the continent. Its success has followed from its relentless focus on providing an integrated cloud platform that addresses enterprise cloud, recovery, and modern application development requirements, which are taken to market through trusted partners.

Cruise explains: “The Routed Partner Portal is the start of an exciting journey for cloud and specifically VMware Cloud in South Africa. End-user enterprises deserve a reliable, highly available and secure cloud infrastructure. Now the channel has the resources to grow their skills and access some of the best support materials available to develop this customer base.

With its Principal Partner status as a Cloud Provider – the highest tiered recognition within the VMware Partner Connect programme – Routed’s partners now benefit from the same level of resources and support that a Principal Partner will enjoy but facilitated by Routed.

“We are changing the cloud landscape, and this is just the start because, at Routed, we want the industry to develop because when the end-customers realise the benefits, we all win,” concludes Cruise.

New partner applications to the Routed Partner Portal will commence in 2022 by engaging with the Routed team.