(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — The cloud computing adoption rate has increased significantly over the past few years, leading to support issues for many users of these solutions.
Recognizing this, enterprise cloud computing provider LTech (www.ltech.com) recently launched LTech CloudManage, which offers a series of technology and services designed to “improve the health, performance and reliability of enterprise cloud computing programs.”
LTech CloudManage is a managed service that helps companies effectively use cloud computing without burdening existing IT staff.
The company offers expert support staff trained and managed by LTech, as well as a combination of third-party and proprietary cloud management tools to monitor and maintain the entire cloud computing infrastructure.
The WHIR recently did an email interview with Ed Laczynski, founder and CEO of LTech, where he discussed CloudManage, its many aspects, and how it can help provide support for companies using cloud solutions.
WHIR: How did LTech come up with the idea to offer these cloud support services?
Ed Laczynski: Our customers deserve credit for helping us come up with cloud support services. As we completed more application and infrastructure migrations from traditional on-premise or colocation to cloud environments, they wanted to have someone there to provide support on an ongoing basis. We already had a support services offering for Google Apps (a SaaS cloud), so we formalized this into a complete managed services offering for cloud infrastructure.
WHIR: Who would you say are your main competitors?
EL: Cloud services is rapidly growing, so I think there is room right now for many different players. That said, the leading managed hosting companies (ones that have their own cloud, as well as colo-type facilities) are our biggest competitors right now.
WHIR: What benefits does LTech’s CloudManage service offer over other cloud computing support services?
EL: We think CloudManage is unique because we provide the human energy required to manage and maintain this powerful server energy that cloud providers like Amazon are making available. There are plenty of monitoring and management tools out there, but very few have a expert at the other end of the line to help you through a problem. CloudManage also offers two benefits that we think will help us lead in this space. For one, our services are not about “lock-in.” We will support a customer that is already on an Amazon EC2 cloud, or wants to move to that cloud, and if they want to take the support in-house at a later date, it’s completely up to them and we’ll assist them with that. We want our customers to know that they may in fact have more control with cloud-based hosting than with traditional hosting options. Second, we don’t look at moving to cloud hosting as a mere cost-saving exercise. Our team will tune applications and infrastructure to take advantage of the scaling, backup, and content-delivery advantages that cloud hosting provides. We want to continually demonstrate value to our customers.
WHIR: The service currently offers support for cloud services built on Amazon Web Services and VMWare-based servers. What other platforms are expected to be offered in the near future?
EL: We expect to support cloud offerings from Microsoft. We are deploying and managing successful.NET and SQL Server stacks on Amazon infrastructure today, but we’ve been keeping a close eye on Azure as it evolves.
WHIR: As I understand it, CloudManage includes a mix of third-party and proprietary cloud management tools. Can you offer details on which tools are third-party companies and which ones are proprietary?
EL: Sure.We use RightScale for our server scripting and scaling management. We also use open-source technology like Nagios for additional monitoring. Our proprietary tools include our load-balancing and caching architecture, deployment tracking tools that leverage the Amazon Web Services APIs, and SalesForce Apex applications for our ticket management and customer information systems.
