Adapting to thrive: Revera’s roadmap for adapting your business to grow and prosper in a cloud-first world

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Innovating in the cloud, before the cloud

Revera’s story began in New Zealand in the early 2000s. As a hosting provider in a small-mid market, Revera’s mission was to enable and empower local businesses in New Zealand with competitive computing power and infrastructure.

At the time, this was unheard of for small and midsize businesses, who found themselves hamstrung when competing with enterprise-class businesses with their own extensive server infrastructure.

“We started our company looking to provide value in our local market in the form of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS). Cloud services had not yet become popular in the marketplace and virtualization was still in early adoption. We built datacenters and began selling infrastructure to customers in New Zealand at a per-unit rate.” – Mike Walls, National Manager of Portfolio & Professional Services

Early on, Revera had shied away from using the term cloud as there was still stigma tied to the term. When asked about how that attitude has shifted, Walls was positive: “We have seen tremendous success with the advent of OpEx and cloud services to the point of New Zealand being a world leader in adoption.”

By listening to their local marketplace, Revera was able to anticipate a global need. Working with customers in their local market, Revera positioned themselves as the gateway for these customers to consume cloud services.

Together, Revera and their customers adapted their business models in anticipation of a cloud-first world. Revera now hosts a large market proportion of government and enterprise workloads. Having transacted in the cloud for years, when the cloud revolution hit the global marketplace, all Revera had to do was change their marketing.

“Our business model was already structured for cloud since we were transacting in the cloud for years—we just needed to adapt our GTM to accommodate the new messaging.”

Hybrid cloud solutions—providing customers with options

For some customers, transitioning to a full public cloud option can be a difficult decision to make. For government and enterprise customers, security and local restrictions can make public cloud options harder to consider, particularly in locations where the nearest cloud datacenters are offshore.

Revera’s experience evangelizing cloud services in Government paid off when the New Zealand Department of Internal Affair’s approved their Revera Apollo platform for its All-of-Government services catalogue.

Revera’s hybrid cloud offering, Apollo, is an Azure-enabled, in-country cloud platform using Azure Pack, System Center and Hyper-V and looking too soon to extend into Intelligent Edge.

The platform was designed with government customers in mind, but was then extended to all markets. Revera recognized that a hybrid cloud option was needed to empower local customers with the same cloud computing power afforded customers consuming offshore.

Revera’s innovation in the hybrid cloud space is a natural extension of their original business. Where once they worked to provide SMB customers access to the same computing power afforded enterprise customers; now, their hybrid cloud offerings are consumed by all verticals regardless of regulations regarding where or how data is stored.

For customers apprehensive about fully committing to a public cloud platform, Revera’s Apollo platform and hybrid approach functions as a perfect intermediary, enabling customers to move workloads to the public cloud as needed, embodying the flexibility that is the at the core of cloud services’ value.

Adapting to the new world—adding managed services

As cloud offerings diversify and proliferate in the marketplace, Revera has innovated to keep pace with an increasingly competitive market. Having worked closely with local customers since their founding 15 years ago, Revera has developed managed services to provide layers of added value to customers on their in-country and offshore Azure platforms.

With larger cloud providers moving closer to shore, Revera’s marketplace has become more crowded. When asked how he has adapted his business to compete, Walls said, “We have listened to our customers and pivoted our organization to provide more IP based professional and managed services across multiple cloud providers as well as continuing to develop hybrid cloud solutions to enable our customers cloud adoption.”

Revera has seen tremendous success since the early 2000s, success that has validated their initial instinct and paid it back with interest. Once a company with around 60 employees, Revera now has nearly 200 employees and in 7 years has increased its yearly revenue from $18 million to near $100 million.

Partnering for the future

As Revera expands and diversifies their portfolio from their roots in infrastructure and platforms, it becomes more important to partner with ISVs to provide customers more transformative value on cloud platforms.

Revera’s pedigree is in infrastructure and platform services. As they look to add more value for their customer, ISVs become valuable partners for the value they can add on top of Revera’s cloud platforms and Azure managed services.

Revera values ISVs for the specialization they provide, and for the mutually beneficial partnerships that occur naturally between organizations with complementary—not competing—specialties.

When asked regarding Revera’s ideal partner, Walls said, “Our ideal partner helps us do something different in the market. We want to work with partners with complementary specializations and shared values.”

Revera places a premium on a culture of honesty and was born with an outcomes-driven mindset that speaks to their customers’ needs plainly.

When going to market with partner organizations, they find the most success working with partners who share those values. The lesson is simple: when going to market with a partner, it pays to know what they do and, just as importantly, how they do it.

Revera’s success speaks for itself, having averaged 40%+ YoY revenue growth since 2013 despite increasing competition in the IaaS space. Revera’s ability to adapt and recognize strengths while partnering in areas of weakness has enabled them to continue to grow and shift their business to thrive in a changing cloud climate.

As an early adopter, Revera refused to rest on their laurels. Instead, Revera has adapted with the times, developing a cloud-managed services practice and partnering with ISVs to continue to add value for their customers in an increasingly saturated market.

For hosting partners looking to increase and maintain their margins in an increasingly saturated infrastructure market, Revera’s model is a blueprint for sustained success.