Kelly woos "scared" customers with cloud start-up

Former Logicalis boss Tom Kelly resurfaces as chairman of cloud orchestration start-up Ospero

Channel veteran Tom Kelly says convincing IT departments to surrender their fears over the fluffy form of IT will be a key battle in his new role as chairman of a British start-up cloud vendor.

Kelly (pictured) has been charged with taking Hampstead-based cloud orchestration vendor Ospero, which was founded only 18 months ago, to the next stage of its development.

Talking to CRN, Kelly said his time at multi-vendor channel firms such as Logicalis, which he left a year ago, had convinced him of the need for an outfit of Ospero's nature to "come in and take the haze out of cloud".

Ospero's platform is designed to integrate an organisation's internal IT with a range of cloud providers such as Amazon, Rackspace and Savvis, making IT the internal service provider to the business, Kelly explained.

"We are trying to show the IT departments within business that cloud is not something to be feared," he said.

"The reality is we all probably have a better IT experience at home than at work. At home we use eBay, the Trainline or Amazon but the fact they are delivered as a service has not really been taken back into business, partly because of corporate governance and risk management.

"What we have developed is a solution which reduces the operational and reputational risk to business by retaining quite tight governance and control over what it does," he added.

Kelly, who began working with Ospero in an unofficial capacity four months ago – about the same time he took a role at M&A advisory firm Livingstone – said the start-up had recently made its first sale.

"Now it's a case of going out there and saying 'we are here'," he said. "We genuinely believe this is different. I don't see anyone in the UK offering this either to end users or the channel, which is why I got involved."