Value added distributor Arrow Electronics Inc. has confirmed deals with CenturyLink and Cologix, two cloud providers which will be added to its ArrowSphere Cloud Services Marketplace offering.
The biggest of the two is CenturyLink and its CenturyLink Cloud will be now available to solution providers, managed services providers and independent software vendors in Canada and the U.S. that have signed up with Arrow.
Cologix, based in Denver, is a network-neutral interconnection and data centre vendor with a presence in Canada. Cologix agreement with Arrow involves eight colocation and interconnection service locations in Canada and the U.S. Cologix data centres are located in Columbus, Ohio, Dallas, Jacksonville, Fla., Lakeland, Fla., Minneapolis, Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver. These data centres offer access to 350 network choices and Cologix serves more than 850 carrier, managed services, cloud, media, content, financial services and enterprise customers currently.
The plan, from an Arrow perspective, under the ArrowSphere marketplace provides the channel with the opportunity to resell portfolios from these cloud providers and others.
The addition of CenturyLink gives ArrowSphere a hybrid cloud offering with IT infrastructure services through CenturyLink’s IT-as-a-Service solutions. This has pay-per -use pricing and cloud-based managed services.
Dee Dee Lear, vice president of cloud and business development for Arrow’s North American enterprise computing solutions business, said CenturyLink delivers industry-leading capabilities that greatly enhance the Arrow cloud line and complement providers’ offerings. Solution providers, MSPs and ISVs, with their tremendous engineering expertise, are now able to utilize CenturyLink Cloud global services for building public, private and hybrid cloud solutions for their business, government and education customers.
According to Arrow, the ArrowSphere platform provides solution providers various engagement paths such as Arrow-managed, solution provider-managed, customer-managed, or connecting through an existing e-commerce engine. ArrowSphere offers automating the provisioning and billing of cloud services for the channel. MSPs are also allowed to integrate their own services with cloud services and cloud-builder products available on the ArrowSphere cloud marketplace.
As for Cologix, they are making its Channel Partner Program available to Arrow solution providers as part of this deal. The program offers Arrow solution providers local sales resources in each market, marketing support, and a deal registration and commission process.
Lear said of Cologix that its colocation and interconnection data centres are strategically placed in key U.S. and Canadian markets that strengthen Arrow’s position in cloud services aggregation for the mid-tier and enterprise channel.