Azure Stack Hub Partner Solutions Series – iVedha

I think we’re good to go. >> [inaudible]. >> Hello. >> Hi. >> Hello, hello. >> I’m here to party crash the recording. So we’re talking about Azure Stack? >> Welcome everyone to a new video of our Azure Stack partner solutions video series. I’m lucky again that I’m here with Tiberiu Radu, from the Azure Stack Hub team. He will introduce me to a new partner solution today. TB, how is it going and who I’m going to talk to today? >> Hello, Thomas. Hello, everyone. Today we’re going to talk with a partner that actually started as a service provider, and then the solution that they build for themselves, they transformed that into a managed service and a package that they actually offer to other CSPs and other service providers.

00:59 - Dodi will go through their journey and how they got here, as well as how they work with other service providers to enhance their solutions. Like before in this Azure Stack Hub partner solution series, we talk with partners both with service providers as well as with enterprises, but also with ISVs that build solutions on top or beside the partner to enhance augment and help them accelerate their adoption with their customers. >> That’s awesome. Now I’m really looking forward to that, that sounds super interesting. I will switch over to Dodi and talk to him today what he actually offers. Hey, welcome Dodi. Nice to meet you, I hope you’re doing really well.

01:49 - We’re going to talk about today about our Azure Stack Hub partner solutions. Before we start, can you introduce yourself a little bit and also your company? >> Sure. Thanks, Thomas, and thanks, TB. My name is Dodi Imbuido. I’m the CTO and co-founder of Aytra. How we started actually is coming in from our parent company who’s a, what TB was mentioning, a CSP. Back in 2011 though, our headquarters in Toronto, there’s really no public Clouds out here. For us, it was really one of those early adopters, trying to find ways and that’s where our journey actually started.

02:31 - We started playing around with Cloud hosting site, different sites of technologies out there. Then circle back around 2014, AWS is coming prevalent, then Microsoft Azure launched, and all of a sudden, you need to start looking at as a service provider, how do you capitalize that opportunity? As you-all know, you will never actually be able to compete with some of these hyperscalers at that small scale, so what we started doing is starting to say, “Hey, how can we complement that with the value?” That’s when we started looking at a hybrid Cloud solution. With that journey that we’ve had, and the environment that we’re in, we’re able to actually start looking for experimentation at that point, and we only have two choices really, it’s either you win or you learn. Really for us, it’s really that journey that made this happen. When we started looking at, hey, it’s now making some gains with our CSP, adding managed services on top.

03:38 - Started looking at that in 2016, and it started hitting on the scalability site because we’re still in that virtual appliance. Here comes Docker, came in, and we started saying, “We need to start investing on modernizing that application.” Circle back 2016, we were able to modernize into a microservice stack, so that we can deploy that in any public Clouds like Microsoft Azure, or even on-prem. But the real value for this, having that journey, is we’re able to create a product not only for innovating and providing that IP on the platform, but really giving our journey and our expertise to any of the CSPs out there. So 2018 is when we start deciding to actually productize this.

04:30 - We had two parts, either we started using it full on with iVedha, and currently iVedha is a direct CSP today. We’re launching some of our US and Mexico CSP registrations as well, and starting to actually grow in that direction. But in terms of Aytra the product, we started launching it, and what we’re looking for is, we looked for about 10 direct CSPs that are willing to invest the time and work with us. That’s around 2019, which is just last year. Look what happened to the COVID at 2020, it’s almost like skipping that 2020 year and just saying, ““Hey, where’s 2021?” For us it was really a journey because really 2019 and then going to 2020.

05:21 - I was actually with TB, had the privilege to go in Singapore in 2019, in front of like, I would say 30 CSPs there, and TB saying, “It would be great to share what you have.” One of the reasons why we called it Aytra, it’s because it’s a Sanskrit word for journey. Yatra is a Sanskrit word for journey. We always think that every single CSPs, no matter what level, it starts with a journey. That’s basically how we started. >> That sounds awesome. Now, I love the part where you said, “You win or you learn,” and I love what you are doing. You made this journey. You are on this journey, and you are helping others going on that journey as well and improving their way there as well.

06:11 - Speaking about, again, you mentioned CSPs and service providers and their environment, what kind of clients do you work with? What is the typical client you’re working with in that case? >> Yes, so it has multiple ranges. A lot of the main use cases basically is for clients where the public Cloud Azure is not in that region, and they actually wanted to become a Cloud provider in that region site. What they usually do is they created their own Azure Stack Hub region sites in there so that it can complement Azure and Azure Stack as a hybrid. Basically it ranges from some regional telcos, it ranges from some large CSPs out there. Then there’s some Tier 2 data center guys that are now looking at, “Hey, we’re stuck with virtualization, we’re stuck with managed hardware.

07:13 - How can we actually create operational efficiencies by adopting this type of architecture and getting ready for the Edge play as well?” I know you guys have that Azure Stack Edge as well. One side note to that is we are working with a healthcare service provider that basically, when that COVID thing happened, and they’re doing some innovations by creating those pods, where you can just put a pod anywhere in the world and have an instant healthcare. With that, we started looking at Azure Stack Edge in this case, and that’s going to be under future site. But mainly for the Azure Stack site, it really does range for telcos and Tier 2 data centers. >> That’s super interesting. I love that I worked a lot with service providers in the past.

08:10 - I just loved that business and I really like these scenarios. You brought up hybrid, obviously, and intelligent Edge and so on. My question to you will be, why did you choose Azure Stack Hub, and how does it fit in your own world of hybrid environment or solution in that case? Why did you pick Azure Stack Hub? >>That’s a great question Thomas. Actually when we started looking at it, we looked at it on two types. We looked at it on the technical side of things, and we looked at it on the business perspective.

08:45 - When we started looking at direct CSPs, and CSP is out there, we started looking at why is it such a vibrant community for Microsoft? It’s because it’s always been like that, they’re always channel-focused. Really looking at even some help from TB, when we started reaching out to them, started putting it in the Azure Stack labs, in our lab site, having some of those initial challenges, you always know that there’s always a help. For us really, the reason why we’ve done that is that we know for a fact that having that business aspect of it that’s taking care of, it really helps that service providers, but at the same time, really what’s happening here without the Cloud infrastructure yet, virtualization is there, so you’re looking at storage and compute, so you can do all that. But really what they did is they put in the networking aspects in there as well, so that there’s no more V line creation manually, there’s no more all of that, and it’s really putting a hybrid Cloud solution together, and some of those use cases is that there’s still some customers, enterprise customers that are still not quite ready, not the fact that Azure is not ready, but basically the operating model and the pricing model of point. With Azure Stack Hub, the licensing part is amazing for service providers because then you can actually help monetize as well.

10:21 - So you’ve got your MSRP, but at the same time, you can actually make some ROI investments. If you do, I think two major things, if you do utilization efficiency, if you’re started bringing in customers in there, and utilizing that capacity, but at the same time how well it is managed on the labor efficiencies. So that’s the reason why it provides a holistic solution to become hybrid, but at the same time, it actually makes it easier for us to look at Azure Stack Edge as well. So it’s an Edge called Cloud-type of strategy, and that’s what we started building that platform inside. Some of the key highlights why we built that platform, and actually after talking to the TB and the guys there, is that there’s some challenges for service providers in regards to customer creation in Azure Stack in active mode.

11:19 - There’s still some PowerShell scripts there, where we started putting our REST API wrapper around it, so that it looks like you have a partner center where you can have that partner center integration, while having that customer account creation efficiently. Our next point, sorry go ahead >> I know that sounds very nice. I was dealing with that, and then I had this flashback, how important that actually is, so I really loved that. Go on, sorry about that. >>The same time as well as we created them, we started looking at meters and, I know TB was, we are white boarding some stuff there and he’s saying, “You know what, I know you can look at the reconciliation in partner center, but why don’t you just use the Azure meters db and the Azure Stack meters db”, so we actually implemented that quickly and knowing that, hey, we can provide some estimates, but at the same time we can get all of those meters right away. With that, we’ve put a pricing. So similar as if you’re going to price it in Azure, we created in our platform so that CSPs can price it, and gain more margin plays in there.

12:29 - So that really helps them with their bottom line, and with that basically, is that’s where we provide the top-level solutions for our customers. So we focus more on those. >> Okay. Now, that’s a again coming from that field working with Azure, this is really important stuff. This is absolutely, I mean, there are many great reasons to use Azure Stack Hub, and I’m happy to make this decision. To understand a little bit more, how are you now using the platform to actually provide value to these customers and clients we talked about? >> For direct CSPs in this case, and their customers, it’s really looking at that self-served capability as well. But at the same time, it provides them a white-labeled branded platform so that their digital presence is there.

13:21 - So you get your branded portal where your customers can go in, and it really provides three major things, is that it accelerates your time to market with your branded platform. I think we all knew that already from the COVID days where some of the brick and mortars are starting to now race towards a digital presence that they didn’t have before, so that’s one. The second one is we’ve put a managed service catalogs, what TB’s mentioning, how do you not provide other values? so we’re creating managed service catalogs in the platform so that people or CSPs can provide added value and create more revenue for them. Our main goal for that is to be sticky with the customers, increase your customer lifetime value, and the lastly with their open REST API capability, we’re now putting a future proof in their business, so when then Azure Stack Edge comes along or Azure Arc or any other services, we can simply integrate that to the platform. >> That sounds fantastic. I also loved what you said at the end here, which I really like that it’s not just about Azure Stack Hub, it’s really about the whole ecosystem around it, also with other Azure Stack products like Azure Stack Edge or Azure in general, where it really drives this hybrid approach.

14:51 - When it comes to actually using the platform, you managed a couple of things already, how you did some of the integration, what platform features do you use to actually provide this to your customers? >> That’s a great question. So part of the modules that they have as well is that multi-hybrid and multi-Cloud management platform, so that you can bring in multiple different Azure Stack Hubs into a single, unified play. We integrated with offerings, so base offers. You know those base offers where you have to actually put it and spin it up to each of the Azure Stack regions, and there’s a lot of challenges there because they’re looking at, we’ve talked to some of these direct CSPs and they’ll say, “Why don’t you just put it as default? ” It’s really looking at the capacity capability, capacity management, doing that quota for all those base offers, but at the same time, simplifying that if you have multiple Azure Stack Hubs in one platform, you can manage your base offers in your quotas and then simply just push it into those systems. The second one is having that orchestration where you can provide your VNet creation.

16:08 - So IaaS is predominantly the services that’s been integrated. We’ve finished our public Cloud Azure AKS integration, so we’re now diving into workloads and workflows. Two types that we’ve seen is that predominantly, some of the customers that are doing the Azure Stack Hub, a lot of them is IaaS. They’re starting to dive into that Kurbernetes AKS services, but it again, it’s coming into a challenge. Not a lot of people are well aware and exposed to, hey, what is Kubernetes, and how they actually utilize that, because there’s such too much of a cross-functional unit that has to know those things. >> That’s fantastic.

Again, I really like 16:55 - the play of the hybrid features that we can go that, and you can also do as you said, for me, that’s the traditional IaaS things, but also looking at more modern solutions with Kubernetes and bringing that to life, I think that’s absolutely great. Honestly, I’m sure the viewers are already very interested in your solution and where they can actually find more. So when I ask you, if I’m interested in your solution or your company, where can I find more? >> Sure. Currently, you can find it at www.azure.com. We are currently, it’s a place holder, I know TB’s been asking me to actually look at that, when is that going to get updated? It’s because we’re still in this stealth mode side of things. We’re trying to finish about four major journey with the partners and customers, but then you can find us there, or we’ll be happy to send some of our contact information. >> That’s awesome.

So again, 18:01 - if you’re watching this video, first of all, you learned that TB is great, but you also learned you can sometimes be a little bit of a pain when it comes to for Arcs. Again, check out the website. We will put all the links and the description of this video, so you will be fine going out and learn more about the solutions. Dodi, I want to thank you very much for having you on the call today. It was a pleasure talking to you. To our viewers, I hope I see you in the next one. >> Thanks Thomas, and it’s a pleasure to be here as well. .