ProfitBricks Founder: We Offer The Right Cloud For MSPs

ProfitBricks has spent the last few years working to carve out a niche in the hyper-competitive cloud infrastructure market by focusing on performance and flexibility. The startup IaaS provider is now making a push to recruit more managed service providers as partners, convinced it offers the right cloud for their style of business.

Andreas Gauger, the German-American cloud provider's chief marketing officer and co-founder, told CRN that ProfitBricks designed its cloud with MSPs in mind. As the service matured in recent years, it introduced more flexible provisioning, greater margins for resellers and more intuitive user interfaces.

Of late, the company has significantly increased spending to highlight and leverage those features in recruiting potential partners. ProfitBricks has ramped up its presence at shows and conferences, hired new staff to foster channel relationships, and will be sponsoring and touring with the ASCII Group, a consortium of solution providers.

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The cloud vendor, with dual headquarters in Cambridge, Mass., and Berlin was founded with the design philosophy that cloud VMs should mimic traditional server environments that customers can intuitively use without needing to adopt a cloud infrastructure paradigm, Gauger said.

"Cloud should behave like hardware, but should be much more flexible than hardware," he told CRN. "We make it very easy and painless for existing workloads running on hardware, like on-prem or dedicated server, to move them to the cloud."

Systems administrators that are comfortable running on-premise hardware can manage the ProfitBricks cloud, or migrate workloads to it, without taking on new skills, he said.

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Gauger and his co-founder, Achim Weiss, were founders and executives of web-hosting giant 1&1 Internet in Germany. That's where the two formed their vision of how hosting technology should work, Gauger said.

"When we left, we decided there was a cool, new space we should get into, which was the Infrastructure-as-a-Service space," he said.

They worked on developing their infrastructure for two years before introducing it to the market, connecting their data centers with Infiniband technology for ultrafast connections between computing nodes.

Two years ago, ProfitBricks bumped up margins for its resellers to 25 percent from the 13 percent to 18 percent it originally offered. The channel push accelerated last year with the upgrade of a tool called Data Center Designer, which improved the user experience with superior graphics, easier management of network topologies, fully integrated account details and a more expandable architecture.

The two ProfitBricks founders also were determined to offer unrestrictive networking capabilities, he said. With Data Center Designer, partners can create unique network configurations of any complexity by simply drawing lines on the screen.

ProfitBricks sought input from MSPs during the design phase of their cloud, and the company has adopted a channel-friendly business model to drive business to those partners, Gauger said.

"If we have leads of a certain size, we don't handle them directly anymore. Instead we handle through our partners, with MSPs we already have," he told CRN.

This is the right time to focus on getting that message out, Gauger said.

MSPs "understand cloud will not go away; it will get bigger and bigger. So now they understand they have to be a part of the market, and so they are more interested," Gauger told CRN.

Common Sense Solutions, an MSP that has been serving large corporate customers in several verticals around the Chicago area for two decades, partnered with ProfitBricks half a year ago.

Kevin Cornette, the company's client services manager, told CRN that business had been growing rapidly, but the data center they were using wasn't keeping up with the pace of technological innovation.

Common Sense evaluated 14 cloud providers, Cornette said. ProfitBricks' simple interface, redundant availability zones, pricing, SLA on Windows servers and responsive service were all factors in making a decision, he said.

"ProfitBricks came out on top, and we've been working with them for six months and we've had great results," Cornette told CRN. "Costs have gone down, and performance, with Infiniband has been excellent."

Common Sense is in the process of completing a total migration of its current multitenant hosting environment to the ProfitBricks cloud and will be using a virtual data center model from then on.

"The Data Center Designer tool they provide for us to use is top notch, and it enables us to do some advanced things really easy," he added.

Cornette said Common Sense opted not to partner with a behemoth public cloud like AWS or Azure and instead go with a smaller provider, because "we don't want to be just another commodity VAR."

"For what we want to do in the future, I'm more confident to have a smaller organization like ProfitBricks to give us that individual attention and help us craft a solution. We don't want to be just another reseller of those services. We basically want to run our own when we can and have something unique that we can offer our clients that acts as a true differentiator," Cornette told CRN.

PUBLISHED MARCH 5, 2015