Azure Stack Hub Partner Solutions Series – Umbrellar

I’m sure it’s going to be fine. Let’s then start, I would say. Let’s start with Tibe. You know what we need to do when we start. >> Everybody smile. >> Everybody smile. I think I will not get interrupted, hopefully. >> Yeah, she’s asleep. >> With all my kids bashing through the door. I hope that they just stay away. >> Hello. Welcome everyone to a new video from our Azure Stack Hub partner solution video series. My name is Thomas Mauerer. I’m a Cloud advocate at Microsoft and I’m joined, as always, by Tiberiu Radu from the Azure Stack Hub engineering team. Hey, how are you today? >> Hey, Thomas. Hello, everyone. I’m doing great. I see you’ve got the right t-shirt on, so that’s awesome. >> Absolutely.

I always try to match the vibe that’s going on, 00:53 - or it was just top of the laundry. I cannot remember. We’re having another very interesting partner today we’re going to talk to. Who are we going to talk to today? >> Definitely. Today, we’re going to talk with Umbrellar. They are a partner that’s actually focusing on both providing managed services, as well as a platform that their customers can build solutions on top. As we went through this series, we’ve met with both partners that provide platforms, partners that build solutions on top, that provide managed services.

01:35 - So it’s a range of partners and Umbrellar is providing both the IaaS platform, if you want, as well as all the way to actually using App Services, and PaaS, and that sort of thing. Marcelino will go in more details on these and I’m sure you guys will have a great time. >> That’s awesome. I’m really looking forward to talk to Marcelino, by the way. Welcome, Marcelino. Great to have you on our Azure Stack Hub solution video series. Tibe introduced me a little about you and your company, but I obviously want to give you the opportunity to explain a little bit more about yourself and also obviously the company you’re working for. >> Yes. Thank you very much, Thomas and Tibe.

02:22 - It’s an honor and privilege to meet you guys and to be here. Basically, I’m Marcelino. I work for Umbrellar. I’m a Cloud Platform Specialist. I look after our 12-node stack for Umbrellar. Umbrellar is a Cloud-based company focused on empowering our customers and resellers in making the most of Microsoft Cloud to digitally transform New Zealand businesses. So that’s, in a nutshell, what Umbrellar is and what we do. >> That is awesome, especially I like the location. So you’re based in New Zealand. That sounds like a lovely place. I would love to visit one day.

03:02 - You mentioned that, again, you’re a service provider for your customers, offering Azure Stack Hub to your clients. Can you explain a little bit more about who your clients are and what you are offering to them in that sense? >> Yes. We have a mixture of clients on stack, ranging from small businesses that have a few competing storage to large businesses, like one of our clients where they are in the health sector. Look, I can’t in too much detail about our value clients, but that’s just the range of clients we have, the mixture, ranging from very small compute to a large enterprise of customers on our platform. It’s multi-tenanted. We do have good solutions in place for our clients and we do have many services that we offer through our portal, and it makes it really good for our customers because we have our own portal, and from there, they can go and purchase anything they want with Azure Stack and services that we offer for them. >> Okay.

That’s awesome, 04:09 - and that’s quite a lot of things you offer there. First of all, you mentioned that you have a multi-tenant Azure Stack. So meaning that you can offer the same Azure Stack infrastructure to multiple different customers and they can use their own Azure AD tenant, right? >> Yes, that’s correct. >> That is fantastic. Then the other thing is, as far as I understood, you’re not just selling the Azure Stack and customers can go through your portal and buy Azure Stack, and they get access to the Azure Stack infrastructure. You’re also adding some additional value by offering managed services. That’s great.

Again, I love 04:50 - what our customers and partners are doing with that. Going over to ask you a little bit how, actually, your journey begins, and why did you decide to go with Azure Stack Hub, and how does it fit in your overall hybrid solution you’re offering? >> We chose Azure Stack because as you know, New Zealand is a very small country on the map, just a very small country. So we don’t have Azure public and the decision around it was for us to have our own Azure public in Oakland or New Zealand, and this is how Azure Stack came about and this is the journey we pursued. We wanted to become the gateway for our clients to use Azure Stack, not only because everything is kept in a data center and within the country, but then also helps them move to the Cloud and start moving some of their resources from On-prem to the Cloud. Azure Stack for them is effectively the Cloud, but they know it’s in New Zealand.

05:56 - So that was our journey and to make it a hybrid feeling for them so they know that when they get to the Cloud, this is how it’s going to look and feel, and just to give them that experience. >> Okay. Now, also, again, we have a couple of cases where this is absolutely interesting, where on one hand, you’re building this to give customers the choice to have it and use the data in New Zealand, and having these offering, not just the data, but also, getting Cloud services, consistent Cloud services of Azure in New Zealand, where they can have IaaS and PaaS services and so on using Azure Stack Hub and that. As far as I understood, it’s also interesting, you help customers also prepare, modernizing their infrastructure on your Azure Stack Hub. They can also go to public Azure as well for some services. So they’re already prepared for that, right? >> That’s right. Yes. >> Okay.

Now, this is absolutely 06:58 - great reasons to use Azure Stack Hub. How are you providing or how are you using platform to provide additional value to the customers? >> Yes. The platform features we are using for our customers is the infrastructure as a service for them, platform as a service. We have Azure apps as an offering, Azure functions. We also use the foundational storage in Key Vault. We’re also waiting to trial AKS. We have a potential client that wants to use AKS on there. We do also use ARM templates. We’ve also automated one of our client deployments using ARM templates with Azure Pipelines. We’ve deployed basically the whole compute infrastructure system; the basics, the networking, the compute, the storage, even Key Vault, and we did it within a few good, should I say minutes, to Azure Stack with Azure Pipelines. So it’s really good knowing that we could automate some of the stuff for our clients. We have a variety of different features that we can provide for our clients, and not to mention, they’re able to onsell as well.

08:12 - They’re able to sell the services for us as partners, as valued clients going forward. So they potentially can sell stack for us as well under the ARM service. >> Okay. That is interesting. Again, I love the story where you get actually these consistent services, again, you get IaaS, Azure IaaS right on stack, and then serverless with the functions and stuff like that. But then you also mentioned the reseller part. If I understand that correctly, you basically offer your Azure Stack Hub services to obviously customers, but you can also offer that to partners basically, which then can go out and resell that on the same stack, right? >> Yes, that’s correct.

Yes, basically, 08:56 - and we have our different qualities that we offer. The way we’ve distinguished the two. We’ve got a pay-as-you-go for our normal clients and they can use that for anything they wanted to and the service, and then we also have one that we’ve labeled as Cloud reseller pay-as-you-go. So that distinguishes the difference between the two. So we can actually have a look and see exactly what’s happening on our infrastructure. >> Noted. That’s great. I really love the way you describe what the offers are with the hybrid consistency, but then also, I really loved the story with your reseller part because I think in this series, we haven’t really talked about that and it’s great to see that this is also a possible way.

09:39 - With that, I know that obviously, some of our viewers will have definitely more questions and they will want to find out more about you and your company. So if they want to find out more, where should they go? >> For our clients, the easiest is just to go to our site, which is www.umbrellar.com, and they’ll have everything there. They’ve got the about, the contact, and to obviously get in touch with us through all the relevant links on the site. >> Okay. That is perfect. Thank you very much, Marcelino. Thank you very much, Tibe, for introducing me to Umbrellar. Again, we had a very good talk. Make sure you check out their website. We will put the link in the description of this video so you can easily just go down and click on it, and you get the link.

10:32 - If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment. With that, I want to say thank you, everyone, for watching and hopefully, see you in the next one. .