Building a Federated Cloud: Tier 3’s Cloud Software as a Service Vision

By Adam Wray, President and CEO. Find Adam on Twitter.

Today we announced a significant shift in Tier 3’s business model: in addition to offering our cloud “as a service” directly to enterprise customers around the globe, we are now offering our cloud software platform to service providers to enable them to stand up their own cloud services based on Tier 3’s enterprise cloud platform.

With more than five years of innovative engineering built in, the enterprise-grade features and high performance characteristics have set Tier 3’s cloud platform apart in the market. The power of this platform will be further amplified when it’s served as a global elastic fabric of cloud services – a growing footprint of federated, connected nodes that work in harmony to enable HA, DR and geo-specific services. Today we’ve announced a service delivery model, in conjunction with service provider partners, which enables just that.

Fast path to cloud revenue for midsize service providers around the world

The current cloud ecosystem is diverse and complex—and cloud customers are left to negotiate divergent services and service level agreements across providers. Accordingly there is real value and competitive advantage to be gained by those service providers who can easily provide comprehensive, global, yet easily managed and consumed cloud offerings to their customers – and even more so for those who can provide the type of enterprise-class features customers demand (HA, built in DR, high performance, security, compliance, etc.)

Yet the path to cloud services is also complex with providers whose best options are varying sets of “knit-it-together yourself” offerings that require significant custom engineering or development on their part. For many mid-size service providers the investment in expertise to create their own cloud service offering is simply out of their reach. The Tier 3 Federated Cloud simplifies the service provider go-to-market experience. By weaving together heterogeneous cloud services into a highly consumable package, the Tier 3 Federated Cloud enables service providers around the world a fast path to market–with a very low CapEx barrier to entry.Service providers can then hook into a growing global fabric of cloud services that speed time to market and enhance their service offerings—enabling them from day one to compete on a larger global stage yet offer the local sales, support and accompanying services to make their offering unique.

With the Tier 3 Federated Cloud, providers are able to maintain focus on their core competencies while Tier 3 manages the complexities at the core.

Enterprise-grade cloud services for global organizations

For enterprise customers, the move to a federated cloud model means access to innovative cloud services from service providers around the world—with all the benefits of Tier 3’s enterprise cloud platform:

• High availability
• Built-in disaster recovery
• 99.999% SLA across network, server, and storage
• And much more…

We know that access to local points of presence (POPs) is critical for large organizations with audiences, customers, and employees around the world. With Tier 3’s growing global footprint of datacenters, customers can deploy, manage and deliver their applications to specific geographic regions, decreasing latency and meeting ever-changing or evolving business, legal, or regulatory compliance needs.

The Tier 3 Federated Cloud gives customers instant global reach and IP with the local touch of individual service provider partners—with added capacity and strength every time a new service provider onboards.

Tier 3 is about more than just servers and storage; with the move to a federated cloud model, we have solidified the transformation from a cloud provider into a true cloud software and services company.