Why Daisy is the latest player to rethink its datacentre strategy

CTO Nathan Marke tells CRN that Daisy has moved to a model which will see it streamline its datacentre portfolio in favour of co-location facilities and the public cloud

Daisy will look to offload its datacentre portfolio in favour of co-location deals and the public cloud, according to CTO Nathan Marke.

Earlier this month Daisy announced a partnership with Azure in a move that would "streamline its offering" and reshape the services it offers to partners.

Daisy announced at the time that it would be trimming its datacentre footprint and, speaking to CRN, Marke has now said that Daisy will look to own none of the datacentres it will be using in the future.

He said that the announcement was the pinnacle of a two-year process that has seen Daisy work closely with Microsoft to invest in the infrastructure needed for a big Azure push, as well as in the skills and capabilities to support the offering.

"The writing is on the wall I think and we wanted to make an early move to give customers the option and then we're going to move at the pace of our customers," he said.

"As a result of that we will be slimming down our datacentre estate but what we're not doing is shutting things down and forcing our customers to leave because that would be counter intuitive.

"I would envisage a footprint of a few datacentres that Daisy do not own but a pay-as-you-grow facilities in wholesale providers with the Daisy network connected to it, but also connected into the public cloud and our private cloud. That's the model."

Daisy currently has 11 datacentres - some of which are owned outright and some of which are leased - with around 1,000 customers operating inside them.

Marke could not put a timeframe on the shift away from owned datacentres, saying that Daisy will move at the pace of its customers.

A trend emerged five years ago of managed service providers building and owning their on datacentres, but this model has shifted over recent months.

Alongside the rapid growth of public cloud, Marke said that vast improvements in networking technology has made it less important to have datacentres facilities so close to customers.

"What's also changed over those five years is the speed of networks," he explained.

"You used to have to have your datacentre close to your customer but you don't need that now. You can get lots of bandwidth at a fairly low price and it means that wholesale facilities in super-fast locations are good enough for customers."

Transformation

The shift to a public cloud-focused approach triggered an internal "transformation" at Daisy, with a number of technical staff and sales people going through rigorous training.

Daisy previously had fleeting experiences in the public cloud, when asked for assistance by customers, but Marke said the new relationships represents more than just a vendor-partner partnership.

Although the announcement was made last week, Daisy has been operating the model for a few months and currently has 20 customers in Azure - some of which have moved their entire into Azure and some of which are operating a hybrid model.

"Quite a lot of environments are spun up in AWS and Azure already, so we've been very familiar with the environment from an internal IT perspective and customers from time to time have been asking us to help them move stuff into the cloud," he said.

"But what this does is formalise it so that we have an opinion, an offering and a preference. That's really what the two years has been about because we wanted to get a product properly built, get a proper change programme, get some scale and a service ready to go.

"We have a pipeline of around 50 customers which we're working closely with Microsoft on, so it really is a scaled operation and over the next five years we just think it's a very rich minefield of opportunities."