AWS Darling Datapipe Adds Microsoft Azure Partnership

Datapipe, a global managed services provider well known as one of Amazon Web Services' largest Premier partners, Tuesday unveiled a new partnership with Microsoft's public cloud.

Datapipe will offer clients who prefer Microsoft technologies, many for whom the MSP is already running workloads in private Azure environments, hosted Azure public cloud in much the same way it has been doing over the past five years with AWS, Craig Sowell, Datapipe's CMO, told CRN.

The MSP, based in Jersey City, N.J., has always maintained a large Microsoft practice, Sowell said, and as a Microsoft Cloud OS Gold partner will be able to offer Microsoft users hybrid IT solutions as it currently does for other cloud environments.

[Related: Datapipe Enhances Managed Cloud Offerings Around Amazon Web Services]

"We've been seeing ourselves as defining a category of the modern MSP," Sowell said. "We perform our own platform, we have traditional IT, we have more purpose-built private cloud and we manage public clouds. This is really an extension of that strategy."

In addition to on-premise Microsoft solutions, Datapipe builds and hosts private cloud environments using HyperV and the Windows Azure Pack to create an "Azure experience," Sowell told CRN.

The new partnership will add the ability to control, configure and deploy hybrid services by connecting through ExpressRoute to the public Azure component, just as Datapipe does for AWS through Direct Connect to link complex workloads such as Web applications.

"For us, this is just what a good leading managed service provider should do. Provide choice and control for clients and help optimize the best infrastructure," Sowell told CRN.

Datapipe's portal has integration for managing all public and private components of those hybrid environments -- AWS and Microsoft as well as Stratosphere, Datapipe's own managed cloud.

"Everything comes through Datapipe and we provide the support across those environments," Sowell said.

The hybrid Microsoft environment will suit customers for many use cases, from Web hosting, to data backup and recovery, to excess capacity management and data crunching. The whole package comes with consolidated billing and account management, Sowell said.

Datapipe is steadily building out one of the largest global footprints for an MSP.

In addition to the three U.S. data centers that Datapipe owns and operates, the company last month acquired innovative cloud operator GoGrid and has a global partnership with Equinix. That gives the MSP a presence in 21 data centers around the world, Sowell said.

That kind of presence is necessary to serve the needs of multinational enterprises, many of which want to expand into Asia and other markets, Sowell told CRN.

PUBLISHED FEB. 18, 2015