Savvy solution providers that have watched desktop and email margins decline in the age of the cloud have extended their services portfolios to include workspace-as-a-service (WaaS) offerings that provide end customers with a comprehensive application portfolio. Today one of the leading providers of those services acquired the company on which much of its core services are based. Specific terms of the acquisition of IndependenceIT by CloudJumper were not disclosed.
CloudJumper decided to the time has come to unify the core intellectual property on which its primary service is based, says CloudJumper president JD Helms. CloudJumper provides a Cloud Workspace Suite of applications that can be deployed on any public cloud or third-party hosting facility.
The company plans to continue to make the WaaS software developed by IndependenceIT available to channel partners, says Helms. But the ability to drive future innovations based on, for example, Big Data, required melding the intellectual property of the two companies, says Helms.
Helms says other solution providers will benefit from those investments because CloudJumper will continue deploying that software alongside them.
“We’ll be easting the same dog food,” says Helms.
WaaS has emerged as a service category that enables channel partners to deliver personal productivity and collaboration applications within the context of a single service. Those services typically go beyond a a desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) or virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI platform in that a WaaS environment enables the service provider to manage applications deployed to the desktop as well. Many organizations that have, for example, made the transition to Microsoft Office 365 quickly realize they want a cloud service that goes well beyond the basic portfolio of applications offered by Microsoft.
It still unclear how much traction WaaS will ultimately gain. But it’s already clear most major desktop application providers, including Microsoft and VMware, are moving this direction. The good news for now at least is that channel partners that successfully deliver WaaS experiences to end customers are almost universally more profitable than rival partners that only resell Windows desktops connected software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications provided by Microsoft or Google.
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