EarthLink is really pulling out the umbrella to get it to rain in Cloud. EarthLink picked up XO's former CMO, Michael Toplisek, as EVP of IT Services. The press release says that he was President of Concentric Cloud, but that was for a hot minute, since XO only rolled out that brand 2 weeks ago. He's not a cloud guy - he worked at XO, Global Crossing, MCI and Frontier - all telcos. The only IT he got near was conferencing at GC. Why would you spin this resume? (Especially after the Yahoo resume-gate.)
EarthLink rolled out 4 cloud packages. "The Cloud Launch Pad, the Cloud Entry Bundle, and the Secure Email Bundle enable customers to economically partner with EarthLink to complement their internal IT resources by leveraging a comprehensive mix of IT Services and security experts in an enterprise class data center environment." [Source: PR Newswire] FYI, "Cloud Launch Pad is designed for organizations that want to leverage the benefits of a virtual environment or that currently run VMware® environments and need additional elastic computing capacity."
These products allow the business to keep things intact, but layer on Cloud Services from EarthLink to complement the current system or outsource extra capacity or services.
The Secure Email Bundle is with Zimbra, encryption and archiving.
The fourth package is Cloud Workspace, which is hosted virtual desktop.
An interesting play since it sounds like it requires MPLS. If so, then ELNK is tying their products to MPLS, probably to insure quality of service delivery.
Will they be able to sell these services against other MSP's and VMware partners? We'll see. It will depend on training - not just salespeople but the marketplace as well.
Watch this video where all the Master Agents talk about why they are choosing EarthLink.
