Arrow, dinCloud Ink Distribution Deal

Cloud services provider dinCloud has signed a North American distribution agreement with Arrow Electronics. Under the agreement, Arrow will offer dinCloud’s hosted virtual desktops, hosted virtual servers and cloud storage services to its North American channel partners via the ArrowSphere online marketplace.

As part of the ArrowSphere cloud offering, Arrow’s partners have the capability to white-label dinCloud’s complete portfolio of cloud-based services, including dinHVD, dinServer and cloud storage for backup and recovery.

The dinCloud desktop-as-a service (DaaS) will open up new opportunities for partners by enabling Arrow’s resellers to add services around these offerings that they can take to market, said John Austin, Arrow’s cloud services practice manager. “The provisioning, billing, invoicing and reporting pieces will all be integrated into ArrowSphere, which is something our resellers are going to gravitate toward,” Austin said.

ArrowSphere also provides access to dinCloud’s online cloud orchestration and management platform called dinManage, which enables solution providers to upgrade, downgrade, and add or remove resources in real time. In addition to providing improved efficiencies, performance and time to market, it also simplifies the IT infrastructure management, service accounting and back office operations, said dinCloud.

While the DaaS offering was one of the key reasons Arrow added dinCloud to its portfolio, another motivation is the cloud provider’s new release of an HTML5 version of its hosted virtual desktop. Powered by HTML5 in Google’s Chrome browser, the new product, webHVD, allows customers to get a hosted virtual desktop from a Chrome browser, running on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux or Chrome OS machines.

As an extension in the Google Chrome browser, it means the hosted virtual desktop can be run from any device, and the fact that it’s powered by HTML5 overcomes some of the challenges of DaaS, including video quality, said Austin. “This opens up a lot of bring-your-own-device conversations because it can run on Windows or Mac,” he added.

With some of the recent announcements from a few big players like VMware and Amazon, the DaaS market is getting interesting, and dinCloud has a nice fit in what they offer in that market, said Austin. “The timing of this is very important for our resellers.”

Indicating that the DaaS market is starting to heat up, VMware announced in October that it acquired Desktone, a leader in DaaS offerings. Together with VMware’s Horizon View, the combined products will offer service providers with a platform for “cloud delivery of Windows desktops and applications to any user, anywhere and on any device.” In November, Amazon Web Services (AWS) unveiled Amazon WorkSpaces, a fully managed desktop computing service in the cloud.

In addition to the product offerings, Arrow also likes dinCloud’s approach to the market. The cloud provider understands the reseller channel and ArrowSphere’s strategy around enablement, branding and working with the resellers to help them be successful in selling cloud services, said Austin.

“dinCloud does a very good job of giving the reseller the tools, the training and everything necessary to be successful in this venture,” said Austin.

Gina Roos, a Channel Insider contributing writer, specializes in technology and the channel.