SHI's cloud mantra: Keep IT involved

Like many traditional technology resellers, SHI International is recasting its focus to include cloud services. But the $4.45 billion company is offering a unique twist: It is focusing primarily on its traditional contacts within IT organizations to help them manage their companies' cloud migrations.

People who would never go out and buy a laptop or other piece of hardware without consulting their IT organizations seem to have little issue with acquiring cloud services on their own. SHI wants to help its customers manage that process.

"Well-intentioned people can put their company at risk when they go around IT with their cloud initiatives," said Ed McNamara, director of communications and marketing for SHI. "A lot of people are not aware of this."

SHI, based in Somerset, NJ, occupies the same space as CDW. So, much of its business is very focused on product deployments and helping corporate accounts with procurement, asset management, and high-volume deployments. It has close, high-level partnerships with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Cisco, Dell, Microsoft, Symantec, and VMware.

The company's initial focus has been on providing infrastructure as a service (IaaS), McNamara said. SHI also represents the cloud offerings of the aforementioned partners, including Microsoft Azure and Office 365. "From a product perspective, it helps for us to handle both so that companies can make the conversion more quickly from 'real' to virtual," he said.

One of the more recent developments for the SHI cloud division is the formation of a partnership with iomartcloud, which will serve as the foundation for a series of enterprise cloud backup and disaster recovery services.

The backup as a service being developed by the two companies will support both physical and virtual environments. Iomart Group is one of the leading cloud service providers in Europe. Its service is based on the EMC Avamar technologies.