Cloudian boss sees a long-term hybrid future

The hybrid cloud market is here for the long term and should be a rich seam for managed service providers according to the boss of Cloudian.

The storage player specialises in offering a hybrid solution and CEO Michael Tso does not believe that situation will change anytime soon.

“People accept that it is going to be a hybrid world with storage both on-premise and in the cloud and more and more people are starting to talk about edge computing and storage,” he said.

“I think some people think hybrid might be a stepping stone [to public cloud] but more and more people are coming to the realization that you need to have both,” he added.

The storage player has announced a significant round of funding in the last 12 months and Tso said that it had produced record growth in EMEA, which contributed around 40% of the firm’s revenue.

The firm is a 100% channel player across EMEA and Tso said that there were more opportunities for its partners, particularly around the management of the hybrid cloud. A large number of the partners are in the UK and mainland Europe, because of the historical strength of the indirect model in those countries.

He said that managed service providers are in a strong position to serve those customers looking for help distributing workloads between on-premier and cloud.

“The market is really ripe for the managed service providers. That is a segment that is growing super fast and doing really well,” he said.

“What they offer is that the customer, whether they be big or small, knows that cloud has to be part of the strategy and part of the cost equation. But you don’t really know how to deal with and don’t have the people so they are not sure what to do. But an MSP can say that they will take care of it and gives the cost points that they are looking for and the ease of management so the customer doesn’t have to worry because the MSP will be responsible,” he said.

Back in April Cloudian launched an MSP programme to specifically engage with that segment of the channel and Tso said that the cloud was complicated and users still needed to use partners to guide them through the process.

Tso is also convinced that a strong ecosystem is the key to success for firms like Cloudian and the firm has formed a number of alliances with other vendors, including Veeam, Rubrik and Splunk, with more in the pipeline, as it looks to make sure it can position itself as part of a wider solution.

“We are in the middle of the on-prem vendors that are interested in us because they want to be more cloud and the cloud guys are interested in us because they want to be more on-prem,” he said.