The news continues to flow from OSCON here in Portland.  After Rackspace dropped a bombshell with their OpenStack announcement Sunday night, managed services and cloud provider OpSource is taking the wraps off of their partner program they have been putting together over the past couple of quarters.

We have covered OpSource several times in the past as they have been rapidly been advancing their cloud offering after just releasing it late last year.  The company which is no stranger to the managed service space, being a leader in SaaS platform management since their inception, started as most with pay-as-you-go compute with strong access control and metering options, then adding storage later with full encryption in-transit, and at rest.

As they started selling their cloud services, and got feedback from many orgs large and small, and they quickly realized
two facts:

One, around 30% of the OpSource Cloud usage was that from their existing custom base that was looking
to augment their existing managed services with pay-as-you-go for dev and production elasticity purposes.

Two, that many service providers and VARS wanted to provide their own cloud patform, but lacked the expertise and/or timeline to implement a full flegded one themselves.

This has culminated in the announcements around the reworking of their service offerings to better suit this new hybrid and very dynamic IT environment which cloud computing is helping evolve at a rapid click. 

Going forward they will offering the following Out-of-box services:

Managed Hosting: including co-location, network, dedicated/virtual servers, OS mgmt, storage, firewalls, load balancers and redundancy.

Cloud Hosting: pay-as-you-go service with virtual machine support for Windows and Linux, storage, and configurable VLAN, firewall and load balancers.

Application Operations: With this offering OpSource will application and server level duties including database mgmt,
change and performance mgmt, and application optimization and compliance.

Business Operations: Business tools that simplify billing, analytics and customer support

Coupled with these offerings are some ones that fall under the "customized solutions" category:

SaaS ISV: A mix of all of the above out-of-box services for SaaS vendors both large and small

Telecom: White label resale of the OpSource Cloud with the Business Operations service

Platform Solutions: Packing and integration of the Cloud service into a managed PaaS service

These solution updates combined with the launch of their partner program OpSource is taking a similar, yet drastically different approach to growing their business as Rackspace and their OpenStack play. 

While Rackspace is betting that by fully open sourcing their stack and making it available to others, combined with their "fanatical support", they will get many orgs and partners to side with them both from a technology/ecosystem standpoint, as well as a customer/revenue one.

OpSource is going the open source route, but is betting that provided fantastic support/services/SLA’s, and making their platform available to others as a hosted white-label service, or premise-based remote managed service, they will get the attention of enterprises and providers looking to enter this arena. A big advantage that OpSource has its its relationship with NTT on the network side of things.  That, combined with siding with "standard" enterprise technology stacks in EMC/Cisco/VMWare, allows them to offer SLA’s with their cloud service that are unrivaled in today’s market.

I look forward to seeing how the ecosystem(s) take hold around OpSource, as they continue to advance their service throughout this year.