Softcat’s Sam Routledge Gives the Service Provider Some Cloud Perspective
Sam Routledge, the solutions director for a UK-based IT solutions provider called Softcat, sat down with SiliconAngle founder John Furrier and Wikibon’s Dave Vellante at HP Discover 2012 to talk cloud, services and everything in between (full video below).
Routledge pegs his company as a reseller turned service provider that hasn’t forgotten its roots. Softcat’s services push is not about being aggressive in the cloud just because everything else is doing it, but rather about offering customers more options.
Routledge elaborates. He says that while some clients are pursuing opportunities to migrate their apps to a hosted platform others are more keen about their infrastructure, wanting full control over the hardware and the data that it stores. Softcat is catering to both of these audiences as those in the middle – the mid-sized companies that want to tap into the cloud without pulling the plug on their legacy setup.
The executive states that his company wants to be the “Burger King of the cloud.”
Routledge goes to explain his firm’s relationship with HP. He says that Softcat’s hosted services run on Hewlett-Packard boxes, but that at first customers were only using it for data recovery. Eventually however clients started realizing the advantages and began migrating their apps to the reseller’s infrastructure, which now serves a wide variety of uses for enterprises across many different verticals.
Softcat can’t compete with AWS in terms of sale and it probably can’t offer a better SLA, either, he admitted later in the interview, but it can offer a better service. Users are realistic about their technology – they know that downtime is inventible and that it will happen regardless of their choice of providers – but better support and guidance can diminish technical difficulties.
It’s about how you approach the problem and how you deal with it, according to Routledge.
The executive delved into a couple other areas, discussing how trends such as flash are shaping the industry and the cloud as a result. He also shared some insight about the UK market, all of which can be found in the full session from day 1 of HP Discover 2012.
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