Weekly CloudNews: Partner-Led Cloud Management, Nutanix Footprint Expansion, and CenturyLink Cloud Destinations

Welcome to this week’s edition of CloudBolt’s Weekly CloudNews!

Earlier this week on our blog, we explored Cloud Solutions in the Multi-Cloud Era. We also officially announced the launch of CloudBolt 9.0—Cumulus.

With that, onto this week’s news:

Recent AWS Billing Error Points to Need for Partner-Led Cloud Management

Kelly Teal, Channel Futures, Oct. 15, 2019

“Telecom expense management has been a familiar part of the indirect channel landscape for at least a dozen years. But the need for its more evolved counterpart, cloud management, provisioned through partners, is becoming more apparent.

In late September, word quickly spread that Amazon Web Services had overbilled a number of customers throughout the world. It was an accident, and one that AWS caught and corrected right away. Nonetheless, the incident made clear that channel partners can, and should, play a larger role in their enterprise clients’ cloud management efforts.

And therein lies the real opportunity for channel partners. While there is legitimate reason to track and monitor cloud expenses for organizations, there is even more call to ensure they use what they buy, and control consumption.”

Nutanix Outlines Cloud Footprint Expansion As Talk Of Acquisition Rears Head

Antony Savvas, Data Economy, Oct. 11, 2019

“Nutanix is planning to increase its data centre footprint further to support the increased number of data storage, disaster recovery and cloud orchestration and management services it is planning in the near- to medium-term.

The company now generates the majority of its sales from software and services, which is a far cry from when it gained quick traction for its hyperconverged infrastucture (HCI) appliances a few years ago.

At the firm’s annual .NEXT EMEA customer and partner event in Copenhagen this week, Nutanix CEO Dheeraj Pandey (pictured) told Data Economy: “We will expand our cloud reach as the compute has to come to the customer data now being generated in the cloud and at the edge.”

He said this would involve widening the company’s partnerships with data centre operators and public cloud providers to increase the number of the firm’s cloud regions, to make sure services more easily comply with data laws such as GDPR and data sovereignty demands from both enterprises and governments.”

CenturyLink Adds Google to Cloud Destinations

Edward Gately, Channel Partners Online, Oct 15, 2019

“CenturyLink has expanded its Cloud Connect Dynamic Connections service to Google Cloud Platform.

The move provides a new option for connecting business premises and public data centers to cloud environments. It allows self-serve, real-time, dedicated network connectivity across thousands of endpoints in North America, Asia Pacific and Europe through CenturyLink’s global fiber network.

Chris McReynolds, CenturyLink‘s vice president of core network services, tells Channel Partners the top three public cloud providers are Google, Microsoft and Amazon, and adding Google to his company’s cloud destinations for Dynamic Connections is “key to supporting the customers’ need to move and stand up workloads when they want and where they want.”