RightScale is the first partner to resell Google Compute Engine infrastructure as a service
Cloud management provider RightScale is the first partner to resell Google Compute Engine infrastructure as a service. As part of the agreement announced on Tuesday, customers can buy Google Compute Engine services directly from RightScale, and purchase custom onboarding and support services from its professional services team.
The agreement will also see RightScale and Google offer custom solutions for industry verticals, including advertising, media, entertainment and gaming. Catering to niche industry verticals is a common approach that cloud providers take in order to differentiate their services from competitive cloud offerings. For example, SoftLayer has built up a significant game developer customer base in the US and Europe by recognizing what online gaming customers need, including latency, capacity, speed and availability.
The partnership between Google and RightScale is significant on a lot of fronts. First, Google is ramping up its investment across its cloud services, recently launching four support packages for services on its cloud platform, including Google App Engine, Google Cloud Storage and Google BigQuery, which will turn on its head the idea that cloud providers can differentiate through support.
Now, even Google is extending support and onboarding options for its infrastructure as a service. Business users who require a certain level of support and may have been hesitant to use Google cloud services in the past may now be more inclined to make the purchase, knowing that a cloud management platform, tailored onboarding service and support are an option.
Second, RightScale works with many of the top cloud providers, including AWS, HP, Rackspace, and SoftLayer, and is a huge proponent of the multi-cloud vendor cloud model, which is when customers consume public cloud resources from multiple suppliers for geographic, performance or compliance reasons. By setting itself up as a one-stop shop for cloud services, and now as a Google Compute Engine reseller, RightScale has found itself a sweet spot in the cloud purchasing process.
“The ones that are coming to us feel a little bit caught – actually, it’s not a little bit, it’s a lot caught – in this changing world, where suppliers like Amazon are out there providing essentially a self-service interface to infrastructure,” Crandell said in an interview with the WHIR. “Nowadays, Amazon supplies support. It’s still not what a managed service provider would offer, but it’s impacting their world in a pretty big way.”
In addition to its cloud management platform, which helps customers manage these multi-cloud environments from a centralized control panel, RightScale’s MultiCloud Marketplace offers pre-built cloud ServerTemplates, scripts and architectures to help customers migrate to cloud with ease.
Talk back: What do you think of the reseller agreement between RightScale and Google? Do you view Google Compute Engine as a threat to your cloud services, especially with the extended support and onboarding services? Let us know in a comment.
About Nicole Henderson
Nicole Henderson is the Editor in Chief of the Web Host Industry Review where she covers daily news and features online, as well as in print. She has a bachelor of journalism from Ryerson University in Toronto. You can find her on Twitter @NicoleHenderson.
