Shadowfax targets other MSPs with own cloud offering

Shadowfax is looking to take on 20 MSPs with its fluffywhitecloud offering

Microsoft partner Shadowfax Technology is targeting other MSPs with its white-label cloud offering which it claims will help those who lack cloud expertise but still want close relationships with their clients.

The offering, fluffywhitecloud, was originally developed for end clients but following £275,000 investment in it last year, the firm decided to direct it at other MSPs, account manager Dave Wilding said.

"It occurred to us that there are a lot of other MSPs that are in the same category as us, previously struggling with services they have received from the big hosting players that are only interested in end-user relationships and not interested in building the channel," Wilding said. "So we thought 'why should we not have a white-label product ourselves and provide this service to other MSPs'?"

The cloud offering, which MSPs can label as their own, is hosted in tier-three datacentres and uses Shadowfax's technical cloud expertise to provide a range of services such as storage and computing resources for running databases.

Wilding said that a lot of the big hosting providers do not give a pricing model that allows MSPs to take a decent margin in the middle and often these providers will interfere too much with the end customers, which is not always what the MSPs want.

He said Shadowfax is taking more of a hands-off approach.

"We can give them the technical information to let them sell the product, but we can be distant in their back-end relationships and the MSPs can label it as they want."

Wilding said he is looking to get 20 MSPs on board with the offering this year.

This service will be a bolt-on to Shadowfax's central business which will continue as normal, he said. This core business is based around support and services and its key vendors are Dell, Microsoft and Cisco. Most of its customers are mid-tier companies with a lot based in the financial services sector.

The firm, which is based near Stansted, employs 15 staff, but Wilding said it is contemplating expanding into the north of England either through an acquisition of a smaller company or opening a new office there.

For its last year, Shadowfax's sales were £1.4m, and Wilding said with its white-label services it is hoping to grow its revenues by 25 per cent this year.