Innovating with Azure: How Atmosera is using cloud technology to bring enterprise-level pipeline solutions to SMB customers
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Shifting with the landscape
United States CSP partner Atmosera understands the nature of the evolving technology landscape better than most. Founded in 1995 as a traditional ISP, Atmosera shifted their focus to provide customers with colocation and managed services in the early 2000s. In 2010, they pivoted yet again, working to provide their customers with multi-tenant and private VMware-based cloud solutions while supplementing managed services on top of those environments. Throughout all of these permutations and evolutions, Atmosera has always been committed to providing excellent, 24x7x365 service—a standard that they still hold today.
In 2012, Atmosera merged with a similar company and both were acquired by a private equity firm out of New York. Atmosera was quick to evolve yet again—fixing their vision on the potential of hybrid environments with the objective of building the world’s leading hybrid cloud platform.
Weighing the options
Prior to this most recent shift, Atmosera had been primarily a private cloud provider, leveraging three of their own datacenters. Deciding to pursue a hybrid cloud offer, they knew they needed to find a public cloud option they could trust and that could deliver seamlessly on the hybrid promise. Perhaps more importantly, they knew that their public cloud provider had to be aligned to their vision.
Initially, Atmosera investigated the possibilities of using Amazon Web Services (AWS) but quickly realized it was a poor fit for their hybrid cloud vision.
“We saw right away that they wanted everything to live in AWS. At the time, they didn’t believe in the hybrid cloud message and didn’t take to the potential partnership in the way we would have wanted.” – Jon Thomsen, CEO, Atmosera
Beyond their differing visions regarding the viability of a hybrid cloud platform, Atmosera also found that AWS lacked a strong tie-in with the enterprise and traditional business markets that made up at least 50 percent of Atmosera’s customer base. Pivoting from their initial position, Thomsen and Atmosera began pursuing the possibility of a partnership with Microsoft.
“When we started looking into the possibility of using Azure and working with Microsoft we loved what we heard – particularly regarding their hybrid vision. We also loved what Satya was doing to develop a partner-friendly collaborative culture. The idea of being able to combine a seamless hybrid cloud solution that we could easily pivot to a full public Azure offering via CSP provided us the flexibility and value we were looking for.” – Jon Thomsen, CEO, Atmosera