Digital Realty Partners With Carpathia to Sell Hybrid Infrastructure Solutions

Digital Realty Trust has signed a partnership with Carpathia Hosting, a managed hosting and cloud infrastructure services provider and its long-time customer. The two will jointly market infrastructure solutions that will combine colocation space in Digital Realty’s data centers with the gamut of services Carpathia provides.

San Francisco-based Digital Realty has been actively trying to get away from its traditional business model of relying largely on leasing wholesale data center space. The company announced early this year that it was going to be using partners to provide more complete solutions to customers, and the Carpathia deal is the latest example of that effort.

Carpathia pursues customers in the enterprise, government, digital media and healthcare solutions markets. Headquartered in Dulles, Virginia (just outside of Washington, D.C.), it is very active in pursuing cloud services business with the U.S. federal government and has a partnership with VMware to jointly provide VMware’s vCloud services to federal agencies.

Not a reseller agreement

Michael Bohlig, director of global alliances at Digital Realty, said the two companies will market combined solutions jointly and align sales teams to refer customers to each other when there is an opportunity.

“We’re not going to resell Carpathia services,” he said. “We expect to generate revenue together, but we won’t split it.”

Carpathia isn’t the only service provider that uses Digital Realty’s data centers, and Digital Realty will be helping market services of a company that competes with some of its other customers.

Commenting on this dynamic, Bohlig said the partnership was about providing more choice to customers. “Ultimately, it’s up to the customer to decide what is best for them,” he said.

While the majority of its 100-plus properties around the world are occupied by wholesale data center clients, Digital Realty has colocation facilities in California, Texas, Virginia and New Jersey, as well as outside of the U.S., in U.K., Australia and Singapore, among other markets.

Former AWS man building partner ecosystem

Digital Realty brought Bohlig on board about six months ago specifically to pursue partnerships with service providers like the one with Carpathia. He joined the company after three years at Amazon Web Services, where he did business development for its CloudSearch product.

Since he came on board, the company has partnered with other cloud providers, managed services companies, as well as companies that build out data center space and do racking and cabling for customers.

The data center landlord has struck deals with network carriers Level 3 and tw telecom to offer direct private network connections between its data centers and the big public cloud service providers Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.

In June, Digital Realty launched a "cloud marketplace," a web portal where users can buy cloud services from providers that use its data centers.