10th Magnitude Gets Microsoft's Stamp Of Approval For Azure Cloud Migration Solutions
Since ramping up its cloud migration efforts almost seven years ago, Chicago, Ill.-based solution provider 10th Magnitude has grown its data center transformation and hybrid cloud solutions to now make up 50 percent of its overall business.
The Microsoft partner's efforts are paying off. On Thursday, 10th Magnitude announced it has won Microsoft's Hybrid Cloud and Infrastructure Platform Partner of the Year Award, which the vendor awards to a partner that has excelled in delivering value to enterprise customers through its data center technologies.
Alex Brown, CEO of 10th Magnitude, said that more enterprise customers are looking to move from the data center to the cloud, opening up opportunities for his company – and channel partners in general – to step in and act as a guide through the migration process.
"It's a huge part of our business today," said Brown. "In the past six and a half years, we've grown up as the public cloud has grown up. We've seen the business take interesting twists and turns, and we've continued to add new capabilities and layers to what we're doing."
Over the last 18 months, 10th Magnitude has built up its offering of tools for enterprise and midmarket customers to help them quickly analyze their existing IT infrastructure and lay out a roadmap to help them transform their businesses.
"More importantly, this set of dashboard capabilities helps customers understand why they need to do this as soon as possible … it helps them understand what the underlying economics are and the return on investment, so that they can pursue cost savings and operational improvements," said Brown.
The solution provider initially began its journey with customer development on the Azure platform to help smaller organizations take advantages of custom line-of-business apps.
Since then, 10th Magnitude has continued to evolve its practice. In 2012, the company added core infrastructure as a service capabilities to its lineup of offerings, and 18 months later it added automation capabilities with DevOps to augment the infrastructure deployment capability.
Now, the Microsoft partner says the "hybrid cloud journey" has ramped up recently as partners become better at quickly helping customers understand the opportunity and economic value of data center transformation.
Some customers, in fact, are motivated by expiring contracts. "[Customers will] have servers and infrastructure stored in a major co-location facility, and they're coming up with an annual renewal where they'll have to decide if they'll stay with them," said Jason Rook, vice president of alliances at 10th Magnitude. "Those customers with a looming deadline come to us wanting to make a rapid move to the cloud."
"It's really about customers trying to reduce their cost, but also improve their flexibility and agility," said Rook. "Sometimes these relationships with external data center providers are rigid, and customers don't have the same flexibility that they'll get in the cloud."
Brown stressed that for solution providers who want to better tap into the cloud solutions and services opportunity, the first step is choosing the right partners to align with and support.
"For us, partnering with Microsoft was one of our most strategic decisions … we have invested heavily in them but it is a two way street," Rook said. "We are pleased with how they're using the channel to drive success."
"In the future, we see a huge opportunity to expand our enterprise footprint and support customers with more sophisticated workloads, to support the speed and agility they can deliver," Brown said. "We want to help customers compete at a higher level and help them harvest the speed and agility of the hybrid infrastructure, driving even more value for end user customers."