I spoke with Brian Hierholzer, CEO of Artisan Infrastructure about his company’s momentum as a provider of wholesale Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). Artisan, which has been around for a few years (founded in 2010) has made a name for itself by distinguishing its IaaS offerings from similar vendors like Amazon, Rackspace, and others, who are selling predominantly to retail markets. Artisan is unique as a wholesale IaaS to MSPs exclusively.
Artisan has partnered with companies like Arrow (powering its ArrowSphere cloud program) and other channel companies in order to enable cloud infrastructure for a variety of cloud IT service offerings. Companies like Asigra, Storagecraft, CA, Swizznet, IndependenceIT, and others are leveraging Artisan’s IaaS to reduce cost and time to deployment of their cloud offerings.
Why does this matter?
The IaaS community, including companies like Artisan, are important because in the wake of the public cloud meltdown and the growing reluctance of international organizations to place their data into the US cloud, private cloud is shaping up to be the best and only solution to this problem. Naturally, IaaS is the foundation of private cloud for most smaller MSPs.
By taking cloud and helping MSPs enable multiple business necessary applications like storage, Desktop as a Service (DaaS), accounting, Artisan is placing itself in a very lucrative and important position.