WaaS provider CloudJumper makes single-tenanted deployments feasible for MSPs and customers in the 10-15 seat range – down from about 100 seats before.
JD Helms, CloudJumper’s President
Workspace as a Service (WaaS) provider CloudJumper is announcing a Single Server version of its platform that significantly lowers the server and software requirements for customer deployments. It increases the market among smaller businesses by making single-tenancy deployments as small as 15 to 20 seats economically feasible for MSPs. It also continues CloudJumper’s move towards what they see as an inevitable future of single-tenancy deployments, which they ultimately expect to support with serverless computing.
CloudJumper has always has smaller end user customers. The problem has always been enabling many MSPs – particularly smaller ones – to support those smaller deployments profitably, except with a multi-tenanted environment.
“Smaller customers have always been a large portion of our business model,” said Max Pruger, CloudJumper’s Chief Revenue Officer. “There has always been demand. The challenge for smaller MSPs has been that it hasn’t been cost effective to try and deliver a single tenant solution. With this, they can now take an individual customer down to 15 or 20 seats, and the economics make sense. Before, there was a minimum of three servers in a single tenant environment, so it was challenging for them to make it work under 100 seats. There wasn’t a viable cost-effective solution for the MSPs to resell.”
Being able to do these deployments with a single virtualized server cuts the cost for unused CPUs, RAM and cycles per virtual machine, and significantly lower the cost structure.
“MSPs have been asking us for more flexibility in their environments and how they deploy, so that they can address this strong demand from the small business space,” said JD Helms, CloudJumper’s President. “We think there is a massive opportunity in that smaller footprint company, and we want to expand the availability of that. It used to take a complex multi-tenanted server environment to make it affordable for small businesses and MSP partners, but when the MSPs would want to make changes in multi tenant environment and they couldn’t. They wanted moving to cloud to be simple and easy. We have shrunk the single tenant requirement from 12 servers, to 8, to 3, and now to 1 server, and eventually we will get to serverless. We want to remove all the friction.”
While the MSP business grew up around multi-tenancy, CloudJumper is convinced that the future is single-tenancy – and that it’s not a distant future.
“Single tenancy is the way it will go,” Helms said. “Microsoft will drive that heavily with Active Directory and how they manage their licensing. However, many of our MSPs also like this model. A lot of our earlier partners have had time to get comfortable with managing and deploying these solutions. They are now more comfortable with taking risk, because they have more experience. That makes them willing to move customers out of multi-tenant and deploy and manage customers in their own single-tenanted environment. We will continue to support both environments. But we believe that the market is moving to demand that every deployment be a single-tenant deployment.”
Helms said that smaller MSPs have been at the vanguard of the sentiment for single tenancy, which wasn’t really something that they expected.
“We’ve been doing his for a long time, and we really thought the large MSPs would be attracted to this, but we have found smaller MSPs adopted it more quickly, because it makes them more nimble,” Helms said. “It depends on their business operations and maturity. Now we are seeing larger MSPs come into this environment.”
Helms said that no magic bullets were involved on CloudJumper’s part in developing this.
“It has just taken hard work and elbow grease,” he said. “It has been a priority for us to deliver this, to make it simple, and simpler for customers. It took a lot of work by our Dev team, and we do have three different patents on the technology, which allowed us to drive this down.”
Helms said this is all part of a massive process of change, even by the recent standards of the IT industry.
“There are some tectonic shifts coming around cloud desktop computing,” Helms said. “The ability to go serverless is being driven by us developing the code, and the work Microsoft is doing within Azure, that gives us further reach into the APIs. At Ignite this week, massive changes are being unveiled. We know what changes are coming, and we are part of them. We are very happy to support the direction Microsoft is going, Support for these product sets is already baked into our solution.”
