Crash-free clouds at least five years away, claims vendor

Disaster recovery software specialist VirtualSharp talks up cloud channel opportunity

The cloud is still at least five years away from being an easy-to-manage, outage-free zone, according to disaster recovery vendor VirtualSharp.

The Spain-based firm was founded in 2010 and makes disaster recovery software for use in virtual environments.

Speaking to ChannelWeb, Carlos Escapa, the firm's chief executive, said the cloud was a "complex, unwieldy and dirty machine" that would take some time to clean up.

"Clouds are not cute, fluffy things. They are more like the steel mills of the late 19th century and they break easily," he said.

"People are on a learning curve at the moment, trying to find out how to manage clouds and make them perform better.

"It took 50 years for steel mills to be safe and productive places, but it will not take [cloud] 50 years. It will be more like five."

The channel will have an important role to play in this process, he stressed, despite fears that some vendors might choose to go direct in the cloud.

"Resellers are worried about their margins [in the cloud], because vendors want to sell direct and use the SaaS model to bypass the channel, but there are technical areas where the channel is vital," he said.

"We need partners [in the cloud] because disaster recovery is a difficult subject and it is becoming increasingly complex because of the cloud," he explained.

The vendor plans to "operate with 10 to 15 partners" in the UK this year and is on the hunt for storage resellers with large, small or mid-sized companies on their books.

"Our biggest customer is a Fortune 20 company, but our smallest one has a little over 100 employees. We want to address the needs of every company [that spans that gap] and we will need big and small partners to do that," he said.

"To be a good partner of ours, you need to be skilled in storage because if you do not have the right storage architecture, the best skills in virtualisation will not help you fix basic problems."

The firm recently signed a reseller agreement with VAR Bytes Software Services, which Escapa claimed has already yielded a "nice, chunky project".

"We are working with some smaller partners already, such as S3, which is a storage specialist," he said.

"The market needs are quite broad and deep and our customer base has grown both horizontally and vertically over the past 12 months.

"We now have customers in the financial services, government, retail and construction markets and have been very surprised by the demand we have had from mid-sized companies and SMBs," he added.

Adam Thornton, sales manager at Bytes, said his firm has a further three to four large-scale VirtualSharp deployments in the pipeline.

"The product fits in well with the rest of our virtualisation-focused product portfolio," he told ChannelWeb.

"But, also, we are seeing more and more IT directors turning their attention to disaster recovery on the back of some high-profile system failures," he added.