In our series of “Straight from the Channel” we interview companies that play an important role in the IT Channel. This week we’ve got in touch with Phil from Cumulus, a provider of cloud hosting for resellers in the UK. These are some of the questions that we asked Phil:

Can you explain how Cumulus developed throughout the years?

Cumulus Channel Launched in March 2011 to provide a range of high specification Cloud services, exclusively to the IT channel across the UK. Originally starting life as the Cloud4 Computers reseller program it quickly became clear that there is a high demand from the Channel, for a cloud services provider, that not only has the services and infrastructure that businesses are demanding. But a provider who really understands how the channel works, that works closely with resellers on all aspects of integrating cloud services into their business.

How many resellers do you have and what type of support do you give them?

We have 64 resellers and growing weekly. We work with our partners like no other cloud provider, supporting our resellers in everything from initial service integration, to marketing and throughout the sales process. Beyond this our expert technical team are always available to support our services and provide technical advice to our partners, supporting them in migrating and integrating these with the clients IT.

Our team are all Microsoft, Cisco, VMWare certified professionals with up to 20 years’ experience in developing new technologies and services. Now with a team of 12, we plan to expand this to around 20 by the end of 2012.

Infrastructure wise, all of our hardware is housed in secure UK data centres and replicated to multiple locations with complete redundancy built in. We work closely with all our major vendors in the development of the platform and standardise on HP blades and SAN’s with redundant failover.

Services wise, we were one of the first UK service providers to roll out exchange 2010 hosting and have remained at the forefront of that service since then. In January, being one of the first providers to fully migrate all of our 25’000+ users to a new platform using exchange 2010 service pack 2, thus dropping the old slash hosting mode soon to go end of life.

What is your message and how do you keep yourself ahead of your competitors?

The message about our service is simple, we have built more into our services than most of our competitors to provide high spec, comprehensive services for a single price.

A case in point is our Exchange offer, for a single price (which is ahead of the market too) you get everything. Our major competitors charge extra for including permanent archiving, connectivity with ANY mobile device including Blackberry and unlimited mailboxes (most of our competitors are still catching up with this.)

Our online backup solution (approx. 500 users now) is far more than just the file level backup sold by the majority of our competitors. We have built in agents for things like SQL and Exchange which provide a full backup, this is of vital importance when it comes to disaster recovery. The big difference with file level backup is you can rarely recover exchange and SQL properly if at all with file level backup. With our agents we guarantee you can.

Overall the clear message for the channel is that we have better services, work better in partnership and give them far superior margin opportunities than the competition.

For more information about Cumulus Channel please visit: