Doug Green’s Post

Transcript

Hey everybody, it's Doug Green. And I'm the publisher of Technology Reseller News and I'm very pleased to have with this today Sharina Kirshner, Data Canopy. Serena, thank you for joining me today. Thanks for having me, Doug. I appreciate it. Well, first of all, thank you for taking time out at a busy day here at MSP Summit. And we're going to be introducing our readers to Data Canopy and we're also going to be talking about the state of the Union of Clout, so a favorite topic. So let's start right there. What first of all is data can? Absolutely. So Data Canopy is a 15 year old infrastructure as a service and colocation company. We are headquartered out of Columbia, MD just outside of Washington, DC We are both a national and international company. Our roots are very firmly grounded in the data center space. That's where really where we started 15 years ago and then evolved into a cloud company as the world has changed and evolved. And now we're sort of back to really being focused on the data center space. So it was very interesting, Doug, that during COVID, we saw a very hard pendulum swing back to the cloud, right? People had to abandon their offices. They had to figure out how to work virtually. So we saw a lot of our customers moving to the public cloud, the AWS, and the ashes of the world. And then as COVID tapered off, the CFO of a lot of those organizations started looking at their bills and they said, what is this cost? This line item called an egress fee, right? So now they're starting to examine that. They thought that they were going to be paying X. For their cloud and now they're paying. Why? And so we saw a bit of what I call buyers remorse for lack of a better word and company started looking for other options for cloud and some of them even went back to on Prem servers as people started going back to their offices. So Data Canopy actually has its own private cloud that they stood up with multiple points of redundancy. What's amazing about that technology is that we actually don't have an egress fee associated with our private cloud infrastructure. So a company can really expect to see a static number every month. Now the downfall of course is that you cannot take your instance and up and down like you see in a public cloud, but you have one static dollar figure that you're working with. So the the private cloud space over the last few months has become. Very interesting as VMware has kind of shifted hard with the Broadcom acquisition and they have very much limited the number of suppliers that they have with their their own portfolio. Also many VMware users have experienced at minimum a 20% increase in the price which has a lot of customers going back and examining other options again. So Data Canopy was a VMware shop for many, many years. Now we have switched and we have. Become a Nutanix shop because it offers many features, a ton of functionality to our end users at a much more effective price point. So that's sort of where we live on the cloud instance side. On the data center side, it's become extremely interesting O with the rise of AI, we see the demand for space and power exponentially increasing. So where we used to see opportunities for 500 kW on a regular basis, now the opportunity sitting on my desk are megawatts of power. 3 megawatts, 6 megawatts, 50 megawatts of power. The problem is, is that there aren't enough data centers with enough space and power to accommodate the needs of these AI companies. And we're all scrambling in what we really see as a gold rush in this industry to provide space and power to AI companies as quickly and as effectively as we can. Today I actually have a six MW space available in Atlanta in Lithia Springs that we can provide high density liquid to chip cooling. If there is an AI company that is in need of six megawatts of space, we absolutely have that available data canopy. So you feel that a data canopy is looking at the situation and you're, it sounds like you're trying to stay ahead of the problem. We are, we are actively looking for space and power. Every day. The problem that we run into are the actual power companies. So even if there's a building large enough to accommodate the needs of an AI company, that doesn't mean that the power company locally can provide that amount of power to the building. That is necessary for many of these types of organizations. But every day we look for new buildings and every day we look for new space and power to accommodate. So you need your, it sounds like you're also suggesting that you need to have a partner that's proactive like this 100%. We need to have partners who are actively looking for these opportunities and we need to have partners who have the ability to recommend buildings potentially. So we need partners on both sides. We need partners who would like to sell. We need, have need partners who would like to buy. We need both. So Serena, we're, we're here, you know, at the closing day here at the MSP Summit. What's your message been to the MSP's? Absolutely. It's such a great question. So our message is twofold really to our MSP partners. First and foremost, the data center space is one that they can easily leverage. You still have clients that have hardware that are looking for space and power. I have 18 different data centers nationwide and internationally. And I do have space and power available for a rack, 2 racks. Tent rocks if that's what your customer still requires because they have on Prem hardware still and they are looking to move it to a data center. So that is 1 product that many of our our MSP partners are leveraging. The other product that our MSP partners are leveraging very regularly is our private cloud and the ability to take a multi point private cloud and resell that to their actual end users and provide. A much higher margin than they can actually make selling public cloud. So our program at Dated Canopy is really focused on the channel and on MSP's. We never want to find ourselves in a competitive situation with the markets that we serve. So we really are focused on data, data Canopy on our resellers and on our MSP partners and never really finding ourselves in competition with them. And you are completely channel, channel only organization. How does an MSP start with you? So an MSP can start with us by reaching out to us. Through our website, www.datacanopy.com, you can place a website inquiry and we will have somebody from the BD team reach out. I really want to thank you for joining me today. Thanks for taking time out at this busy event. And we'll, we'll, I'm looking forward to further podcasts and learning more about your company. Thanks for having me.