DataBank Looks to the Channel to Spur Managed Hosting Sales

DataBank, a provider of managed data center hosting services, has appointed William Pratt to the newly created position of vice president for channel and managed services sales.

Before joining DataBank, Pratt most recently had been senior vice president of colocation and vice president of enterprise and channel sales at Datapipe, which was acquired by Rackspace in late 2017.

DataBank currently operates 19 data centers in nine different markets located in underserved markets such as Atlanta and Minneapolis that are not near data centers operated by public cloud services providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft, says Pratt.

One of the first priorities will be to provide channel partners with additional training and sales tools to better position the value of managed private hosting services provided by Databank against public cloud services, says Pratt.

While more enterprise IT organizations than ever are looking to decommission their own data centers, it doesn’t always follow they want to move their application workloads into the public cloud. They want to eliminate the capital expense associated with building and maintaining a data center, but they still want to make sure their application workloads are run in complete isolation generally because of either performance concerns or compliance requirements.

Channel partners should also take note of the fact that just because an application was built on a public cloud, it does not necessarily mean that the application will be deployed on a public cloud. Many IT organizations only rely on public clouds to build but not deploy their applications. In many cases, IT organizations want to be able to deploy an application as physically close as possible to where it will be consumed.

Pratt says DataBank will be looking for partners that can complement the hosting providers existing managed services targeted at the infrastructure level.

“We’re looking for partners that can manage up that application stack,” says Pratt.

Competition across the managed hosting space is, of course, already fierce, which means channel partners have no shortage of options. The selection of which hosting service to go with will not only be determined by location but also which hosting provider does the best job enabling channel partners to identify classes of workloads that run better outside of a public cloud.