Fresh off the excitement of its acquisition by Permira Funds, Metalogix is back to what it always did best — data migration and migration tools.
This time it comes in the shape of a new Cloud Acceleration Partner Program which Steve Marsh, director of product marketing at Metalogix, claims will provide anything any enterprise needs for cloud or hybrid migrations.
For those working around SharePoint Online or Office 365, the names of the six initial partners will be familiar: BrightStarr, Cardinal Solutions, En Pointe, Neudesic, Slalom Consulting and Statera.
Migration Landscape
The launch of the program coincides with Microsoft’s recent announcement that it will cough-up $60,000 to any company that moves its enterprise infrastructure and data to Office 365 or any other Microsoft cloud technology.
Those who have already migrated their data will know that $60,000 doesn’t really go very far with this kind of project, especially when you are talking in terms of the terabytes or even petabytes of data. So what is the problem exactly?
Despite a strong industry push in recent years to move content collaboration to the cloud, a significant number of companies are far from achieving cloud adoption This is largely due to a lack of professional experience in migrating content and training end users on how to maximize their cloud productivity.
In fact, in a Wall Street Journal article last May, Gartner Vice President Tom Austin estimated only eight percent of enterprise employees moved to cloud-based office systems in 2013.
But there are a number of drivers now, Marsh told us, and that has pushed Metalogix to create the program. "An Increasing amount of content combined with an increasing number of associated roadblocks was one of the contributing factors in setting up this program,” Marsh told CMSWire.
"The other really big driver was Microsoft’s offer of one terabyte of storage for business users that really got businesses thinking about migration. With that level of storage, companies were looking at their investments in file share or other kinds of storage, and asking themselves whether it was not worth going to Office 365, especially given the $60,000 that Microsoft was offering."
While $60,000 doesn’t cover the costs, it does get the conversation going, he said.
Metalogix's Logic
As a migration specialist, it seems a bit odd that Metalogix would be pulling together this kind of program, given that its own core business is migration.
Marsh said the issues around migrations at this level of data are so complex that it's really necessary to pull in as many experts as possible to help resolve issues.
Metalogix is already offering a Cloud Acceleration Suite of tools help companies move to Office 365, OneDrive for Business, Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web Services. But Marsh said the tools are not enough, adding:
Companies need to be able to access all kinds of different people who know all kinds of different things about migrations so we pulled together a bunch of companies that we already knew and trusted so that if a company wants to migrate to Office 365, for example, we have experts and tools on hand that can help them do that."
While vendors regularly create partner programs that go unnoticed outside of a very small group of concerned enterprises, this one is likely to reach across the entire business spectrum.
With it, Metalogix is offering both the technology and the expertise to put enterprises on the right road, something that is often overlooked in all the talk around applications and tools.
0 Comments
Email This
Stumble This