Egenera Launches Wholesale Cloud in Equinix Data Centers

Egenera has launched a wholesale cloud offering out of Equinix data centers. Dubbed Xterity, it lets resellers and channel partners build and brand their own cloud services for sale to their customers, choosing from a variety of public clouds or Egenera’s cloud infrastructure located within Equinix data centers.

VARs and MSPs are facing increasing pressure from customers to provide cloud services. Egenera’s software gives them the ability to design, price and manage complex multi-tier and multi-cloud application environments for their endusers.

Xterity users can place workloads on an end point that delivers the required Service Level Agreement (SLA) and that best fits the customer's market. Egenera completely manages the cloud infrastructure, while the reseller takes charge of the end-user relationship.

The company is initially launching the service in two Equinix locations in the US and one in Asia Pacific, with plans to roll out further locations. Egenera is hosting cloud pods, its own public cloud infrastructure within Equinix, which is one potential building block for reseller clouds.

The company’s wholesale cloud offering is similar to Colorado-based Faction (formerly Peak). Faction and Egenera both allow the channel to resell and rebrand their cloud infrastructure.

The difference, according to Egenera, is that it offers cloud brokerage capabilities in addition to white labeling. A marketplace of multiple clouds allows customers to tailor workloads to the right cloud.

Egenera might be relatively new to the wholesale cloud game, but it is by no means a startup. Founded back in 2000 by then-CTO of Goldman Sachs Vern Brownell, the company looks completely different than it did 15 years ago.

“We started as a hardware company, building blade chassis before people really knew what a blade server was,” said Egenera CEO Pete Manca. “We later coupled it with virtualization technology. Fast forward to the mid-2000s, and HP, IBM and others began coming out with blade offerings and we couldn’t compete, so we took our software off the hardware and sold it by itself. That product still does well.”

That product was the company’s PAN Management, a converged infrastructure management software. It is one of two core products that form the basis of the wholesale cloud offering.

The other came about through that acquisition of Irish company Fort Technologies in 2012, which gave Egenera Cloud Director cloud software, and self-service portal catalog capabilities.

“One of the reasons we chose to acquire them is they can handle a multi-tiered distribution model,” said Manca. “There’s a lot of complexity of having to manage billing, QoS, and this software. Cloud is distributed from reseller to end user, across multiple clouds.”

The company has run a wholesale cloud service in Ireland for the past couple of years out of a Citidel100 data center. Manca said it’s been the company’s fastest growing offering, with more than 30 channel partners reselling to their end users in short time. The Xterity launch basically takes that service global, joining the wholesale cloud platform with Equinix’s platform.

In limited release, Manca said that customers mostly used resources on Egenera’s cloud, with very few utilizing hybrid. Equinix’s Cloud Marketplace and private connectivity options open up the choices and connectivity to several clouds. “There’s more and more desire to go hybrid, so the focus is on multi-cloud,” said Manca.

“One of the things we learned in Ireland is that the channel is used to selling hardware or services to customers, but customers ask to resell cloud. They first try reselling public cloud but the 4-5-6 points of margin selling Amazon aren’t enough. They then go off and buy packaged software and build their own cloud and realize they don’t necessary have the skillset. We manage the cloud for them, all they do is put their name on it. They can offer a solution at a higher quality of service."