CloudJumper one of the leading cloud solution providers helping MSPs with their cloud deployments. Ulistic spoke with Max Pruger and J.D. Helms owners of CloudJumper to provide information that as an MSP, you need to know.
What Is CloudJumper And How Is It Used?
CloudJumper is a platform that helps MSPs migrate their clients to the Cloud and run their Windows desktops in a cloud-based environment. By doing this, they don't have to worry about all the various problems that exist in on-premise work.
The foundation of our company is its software platform. We use it to deliver a full-service solution where our partners choose to have us take care of Tier 2 and 3 responsibilities and infrastructure. Then The MSP provides their key services back to their client.
We have partners who use both sides of our house. When they do this they can take our toolset and deploy that across either a net new deployment or we also have migration and integration tools that make it seamless to overlay our software on top of existing deployments. This gives them a much more efficient, single pane of glass to manage those Windows RDS environments.
How Does CloudJumper Work With Other Desktop or Cloud Services?
If MSPs want, CloudJumper can take the entire desktop experience and manage and run it. They then overlay their clients' applications and services on top of our environment.
Or, if MSPs have an existing Windows RDS environment that they manage in their own data center or office, or even if a client has a private cloud desktop service that they run, they can use CloudJumper to manage their experience.
CloudJumper software can be deployed in either of these scenarios:
- CloudJumper's Full Service solution takes care of all the backups, antivirus, and security aspects that go along with it. We make sure that the infrastructure is running properly and monitor it all.
- On the other end of this spectrum, we have a Toolset if MSPs have other data center commitments and they need to leverage those contracts. Or where they may have capital investments and existing hardware that they are co-locating and they want to ensure they get the most advantage from that infrastructure.
What Are Some Of The Challenges MSPs Face When Explaining The Benefits Of The Cloud? How Can CloudJumper Help Them Ease Their Clients' Concerns When Migrating To The Cloud?
The first thing to do is address each issue your client has. Moving an infrastructure to the Cloud is still a relatively new concept for most end customers.
Economic Concerns: For example, most understand the economics of moving servers to the Cloud. Now with CloudJumper, it makes sense to move their entire IT infrastructure to the Cloud.
Implementation Concerns: A few years ago there were difficulties with implementation and concerns surrounding it. Now all of this is changing. We're seeing more end customers going to their MSPs asking for a cloud-based solution. It's the MSPs job to provide peace of mind that their IT will remain secure, accessible and easy to use.
Microsoft even refers their opportunities to CloudJumper through their channel partners. We help them use the rhetoric of making the Cloud a utility. But it's still complicated. And if MSPs try to explain this themselves, it sometimes expands the level of complexity. Where MSPs are trying to do this across many partners and end customers, it's a single pane of glass for us to do for them.
We make things simple from a pricing and implementation perspective. We've done the research and have put together sales and marketing tools that make it easier for MSPs to convince their clients to migrate to the Cloud.
Why Is The Cloud Here To Stay?
There's no risk of the Cloud disipating. That would be like saying the Internet is a fad. The Cloud is definitely here to stay. And you can see this with the investments the Microsoft's of the world are making.
CloudJumper goes back to 2009 as a pioneer in cloud computing. The reason the market is adopting cloud computing so quickly today is that you have a "perfect storm" event occurring.
- You finally have the infrastructure pricing that has come down to a point where it is economically feasible;
- You have companies like CloudJumper that have created software that allows you to automatically orchestrate, scale, deliver, deploy and match your workloads to cloud-computing resources; and
- You now have the bandwidth that allows for a great experience in a cloud-computing environment. You can be at home, at work or on the road and still have access to all of your resources in the Cloud and work on them in real time.
These events will continue to drive the Cloud forward, and more companies will be adopting it over the next few years.
Would Something Like Graphics Applications Keep A Company From Moving To The Cloud? Where Doesn't The Cloud Make Sense?
We don't think so. All of this is shifting with GPUs being available. CloudJumper supports GPUs through Microsoft Azure and our partnership with Google. MSPs can simply choose the machine type and run the VDI for the user, and it runs just fine.
Where a Cloud may not make sense is where connectivity is a problem. If you're in a region where connectivity is a "no-go" you're basically locked out of the Cloud. But with more fiber buildouts, 4G and now 5G, this will be changing. When this happens, the Cloud will be the norm.
Where people are talking about "birthing through the Cloud" to take advantage of cloud assets – I think we're going to see this model "flip on its head" over the next 12 to 18 months. You see that most of the assets are now in the Cloud.
I believe on-prem servers will all be going away. Whether you're looking at Google G-Suite apps or Microsoft Office 365 licensing, and even Active Directory... if you're using
Office 365 you're using Azure Active Directory Services. All of this is going to the Cloud.
CloudJumper has three patents that support this with direct integration with Office 365 in some of the new products that we're releasing. And, we've just recently announced Cloud Workspace for Azure. It's a marketplace app. You can install it for your clients, and when the implementation is finalized it's nearly completely automated where the partner is concerned. You literally go into your Office 365 subscription and click the users you want to enable a cloud workspace for.
The rate of development from what we're seeing with Microsoft as well as Google and GCP shows that this whole industry is rapidly expanding. It's a great opportunity to get in early and get your "piece of the pie." However, "the pie" will be expanding. So get your piece, and come back for more.
Where Do You See The Role Of The MSP Into The Future?
Some think there's not that much to manage now, but we beg to differ. This is a huge opportunity for MSPs. I equate it with the days where break-fix companies transitioned to Managed Services.
This is the next evolution of Managed Services where there's not as much to manage on the physical environment. The whole goal of the MSP is being your end customer's trusted advisor. You want to be their virtual CTO.
By doing this you'll be providing them with a higher level of service, a more consistent service, one that you can manage with more visibility, and one that's more secure. Now, you'll be delivering all of this through a different mechanism which is through the Cloud using our software.
You can look at CloudJumper software as the next evolution of Managed Services tools or RMM tools. We like to call ourselves the "RMM Tool For The Cloud."
Then what ends up happening is that those standard services you provide today on the prem side that don't provide the value you need, are all automated and those mundane support management tasks are taken care of for you. So, now you're freed up to deliver a higher level of service to your clients.
You still need to recommend the line of business apps, but you can do this faster and scale your business by putting your clients in the Cloud software without having to employ a bunch of technicians to do this onsite managing machines with an on-prem RMM tool.
Plus, remember that we're still using servers. They just happen to be in the Cloud. They don't go down as often as an on-prem server, but they still go down. Your clients will still need you to help them quickly recover from this and stay up and running. There's no shortage of work for MSPs.
We think the Cloud is a safer bet for you. It's much harder for another MSP to come in and analyze your client's environment with a toolset and convince them to move. Because before they can analyze your client's environment, they need your permission to connect to it.
It's not an all-or-nothing proposition. You may have some clients where the CloudJumper full-service solution is best and others where it makes sense to use their own solution and use CloudJumper to manage it. And both of these clients can be managed from one single pane of glass.
What About The Business Continuity Aspect Of CloudJumper?
We run our own windows systems through CloudJumper. With the hurricanes over the past few months and with our support team here in Raleigh, NC, if we lose power it's not the end of the world because we have staff around the country who can pick up the support calls. All of our data is out living in Azure Cloud. So the business continuity is there.
When there's a disaster anywhere we give our partners and their customers a number of months of free service to help migrate them over to a cloud environment when they're trying to recover.
What's Coming Down The Pipe At CloudJumper?
We have our Cloud Workspace For Azure that's easy to deploy a workload. Plus with CloudJumper, if you have one client in Microsoft, one in Google, and one in their own data center, you can log them all in from one pane of glass through our interface.
A lot of what we're doing now is helping our partners migrate their clients over to our software. One partner is moving 6,000 seats over to Citrix and keeping the migration simple. By doing this, they're saving over 40% just on their licensing costs alone.
What Are The Revenue Opportunities For MSPs Using CloudJumper?
In respect to revenue, you can take your existing employee base and scale your business in orders of magnitude, while keeping your costs down.
We're about a year ahead of the market and haven't hit the critical mass base, so the MSPs that get in early today have a tremendous opportunity to own this market.
And remember, once you move clients to the Cloud, it's an extremely "sticky" solution. So, if I were starting an MSP today, I would start as a cloud-first only model and get as many customers into the Cloud as I could. Look at it as a utility model. Once they move you have their entire office in the Cloud and you get a check every single month.
We are 100% channeled and have over 1,000 MSP partners today.
We also have some partners who are bundling Hardware-as-a-Service with CloudJumper. Some of our partners bundle it with a thin client. There's not one that we recommend over others, but we've seen a lot of success with Dell's Wyse Thin Client.
We use Chrome Books internally and we see partners having success with this. We even have partners that are buying Intel PC Sticks. We see a little bit of everything since we have such a wide array of partners. Obviously, the more you can bundle, the more value you can obtain.
Last Words
It's a great time for MSPs to get into the business as a cloud-first CSP model. Those who get in early will be the most successful. We believe this is where the market is headed. This is a "land grab."
From a technical perspective what we do is help orchestrate, provision, monitor, and manage MSPs' clients' environment in the Cloud. The benefit is that you can manage your clients' workloads to resources in real time. Up until now, the reality of this has been difficult because you had to dedicate a technician to monitor and manage this. What we do from a software perspective is automate this process.
So now you can have CloudJumper literally watch your clients' environment and scale those resources up and down to the point where you can completely shut off and environment and wake it upon demand when the client needs it. This way you can manage those workloads and match them to what the end client is using in real time and optimize your cost.
CloudJumper is revolutionary and we're very excited. If you're not already using CloudJumper, reach out to us. We take the pain out of the startup. If you use the full-service offering there are no initial fees. Everything is month-to-month. We don't bill you until you provision live clients.
There's an education component and we spend a lot of time working with our MSP partners. We've developed a lot of partner-enablement collateral, with ROI calculators and sample marketing slicks. We know that we're not successful unless our MSPs are successful.
Visit cloudjumper.com, fill out the contact form and we'll look forward to talking!
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