verizon
Redefining the New Enterprise Cloud
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BuzzBy John McEleney
Today we’re extremely excited to announce that we are being acquired by Verizon and joining Terremark, its IT services subsidiary. This is major news for us, and we believe for the cloud industry as well.
We’ve been working together with Terremark for almost two years and have built great relationships with Verizon and Terremark, based on our hands-on experience with the Terremark clouds. It’s clear that F1000 companies are looking for enterprise-class cloud services that cover a broad range of their needs – not only commodity clouds, but also higher levels of SLAs, enterprise procurement processes, professional services, security models and dedicated systems. And they want these to be provided by a trusted name in enterprise IT services like Verizon.
The other critical aspects for enterprise cloud adoption are the ones we founded CloudSwitch to address: enterprise control, simple on-boarding, tight integration with enterprise networking, security and management systems, and the freedom to move application workloads to the right cloud without complex re-engineering or lock in. The combined capabilities of Verizon, Terremark and CloudSwitch offers enterprises what they’ve been looking for and moves the industry forward, helping to further define the enterprise-class cloud model.
It’s important to highlight (and very important to us at CloudSwitch) that Terremark is strategically committed to open policies and will maintain support for multiple clouds and hypervisors, since we believe that enterprises truly value this openness. We’re also impressed at Verizon’s commitment and leadership strategy in the enterprise cloud market: after acquiring Terremark for $1.4B and creating a subsidiary within Verizon, they’ve now brought on a software company to add software development and innovation capabilities to the team. That’s the kind of leadership the enterprise cloud market requires.
We’re looking forward to working even more closely with Verizon, and our whole CloudSwitch team will be staying right here in Boston to build and scale our software and deliver new software-based capabilities. We’ve been at the forefront of cloud innovation since 2008, and this begins a new chapter for us as we team with Terremark to take enterprise-class services to the next level.
Verizon/Terremark – A New Phase in Cloud Computing Begins…
By Ellen Rubin
Back in September, I blogged about a strange situation I had noticed in the cloud market: Where Are the Telcos? At that time, Verizon had made their initial announcement about their new CaaS offering for the SMB market, which only seemed to highlight the relative lack of leadership and progress by telcos in the cloud market. With yesterday’s big news about Verizon acquiring Terremark, it appears that the telcos are starting to show up.
Several people commented on the earlier blog that my arguments were mainly true for North American telcos, and as I’ve learned since, outside of North America, the telcos have been far more active in building clouds and embracing this new business model. But as a global leader, Verizon’s recent activities are a major step in the evolution of the cloud industry, likely to have significant impact on the market overall. While it’s too early to understand how the acquisition of Terremark will play out in terms of specific services, data center locations, etc., what’s clear is that one of the largest telcos with massive resources, broad reach and enterprise credibility has made a real commitment to integrating cloud computing into their business model.
Till now, there really hasn’t been a large, enterprise player to compete with Amazon – Terremark has made impressive progress over the past few years (as we've seen first-hand as a partner), but is still relatively small on its own. With the strength of Verizon behind it, Terremark now has the opportunity to scale in an unprecedented way and extend enterprise cloud computing, leveraging its technology stack and expertise. Stay tuned for more thoughts as the acquisition plans unfold, but one thing is certain: 2011 is off to a very interesting start…
Register for a live webinar with Terremark and CloudSwitch:
Hybrid Gets Real: Blending Private and Public Clouds
March 3, 2011: 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM EST
