In London these celebrations have been particularly vibrant, particularly in China Town where the Year of the Dragon was welcomed with glamour. According to tradition, Dragons are the mightiest of the signs, symbolising both ambition and success, unafraid of challenges and most importantly, willing to take risks in order to succeed.

I think these will be good traits to take with us into the coming year. 2012 will of course be dominated by cloud, but it will be the businesses which create a new vision of cloud, which continue to push the boundaries of the technology, who take the risks, it is those companies who will ultimately deliver on the ‘cloud promise’.

At Virtual1, we’ve been doing our own ‘boundary pushing’, by establishing the Cloud Exchange, an environment which allows Partners to create and sell their own unique cloud solutions. Below I have added content from an article I wrote for December’s Comms Dealer about the Cloud Exchange and the benefit it will bring. If you are interested in finding out more, give me or one of the team a call.

Happy selling,

Tom

Taken from an article which appeared in the December 2011 version of Comms Dealer.

The Cloud Exchange^TM

Analysts rarely talk about networks now without talking about the Cloud – the two have become almost synonymous. And yet resellers are still very much at the starting line in terms of achieving a real competitive advantage through a Cloud proposition. This is where the Cloud Exchange^TM comes in.

The Cloud Exchange^TM was borne of our recent expansion into Co-location services. We have interconnected our network with our state-of-the-art datacentre facilities to deliver on-net hosting capabilities to our Partners and their customers.

The effect of this has been two-fold.

Firstly, it has answered the growing customer demand for private cloud solutions, which offer a compelling compromise between the benefits of a cloud solution and the security concerns of putting mission critical systems and data on the public internet. Put simply, we connect a customer’s co-location directly to their Virtual1 network, essentially providing them with their own on-net hosting where they can locate their own hosted applications, even firewalls and other security devices as required.

However, more importantly, the Cloud Exchange^TM also offers resellers the capabilities they need to develop their own cloud proposition. Using our on-net capabilities, resellers can create their own private cloud environment and use it to host anything they would normally provide on the LAN – so that could be centralised PBX, call recording, Citrix, MS Exchange. This can then be presented to their customers as a hosted solution, and from here it is a small step to delivering a much wider breadth of services and solutions, all within the cloud and, if done well, all profitable.

And this is where I believe aggregators can really make a difference to their partners – by providing not just the bare connections, technologies and circuits, but by using our unique reach, our unique breadth of capability to help resellers create the added value solutions that customers expect, and for which they will pay a premium.

But I would like to pick up on one point with which both sides of the fence have to agree: he mastered the art of making things simple.

Whether it is the design of a complex piece of technology, a process that needs following or a blog posting, the simplest option is often the best. In the world of networks, this is even more obvious. With the evolution of Ethernet we have been able to eradicate complex interfaces, achieve simple framing types and push costs down – all great strides towards a simpler network.

Going up a level in the networking stack, many network designers fall under the spell of the feature-list handed by their hardware vendor of choice or are otherwise swayed by the extravagant demands of the end-customer.

But I say STOP! Go back a step and start with the basics:

• Consider a simple MPLS network with no QoS, failover, VLANs or anything else
• Think static routing before you get carried away with the work of Edsger Dijkstra
• Use the smallest IP subnet sizes possible
• Forget anything proprietary, experimental or unratified

You’ve now got a useless network that is very easy to trouble shoot. So what good is that? Thinking from this angle immediately makes you question what you really need and how you can best deploy it. Adding a second circuit for resilience here and there makes perfect sense. Using a known and non-proprietary protocol like VRRP flows naturally from that decision.  Dynamic routing protocols such as BGP will protect against failures and make changes easier at the expense of increased support and configuration complexity. And so on.

You’ll be able to explore that feature-set in the same way a discerning diner selects the tastes they want to experience from the menu they peruse. Or a music-lover, choosing what music to put on their MP3 player.

But whatever you do, don’t make up the requirements. Be honest. Does your customer really need that? Shouldn’t you really have some of this? Don’t be greedy.

When you’ve built it in this constructive, bottom-up style, test it against the applications, users and geography. Temper the whole thing with a keen eye on the budget and a focus on what the successful network will do and how it will behave.

The result will be simple elegance. And we know from the work of Mr Jobs, that will always have a certain appeal.

The award is voted for by a panel of independent judges and recognises exceptional contribution to the Channel marketplace over the last 12 months.

Tom O’Hagan, Managing Director at Virtual1, commented “Virtual1 is 100% committed to providing the best service to our Partners and this award is a resounding recognition of everything we as a business have achieved over the past year. I am thrilled and delighted and would like to thank my whole team for their hard work and dedication to providing what is officially the best network provider for 2010 – 2011!”

For further information about the awards, please visit www.cnawards.com

The award is voted for by a panel of independent judges and recognises exceptional contribution to the Channel marketplace over the last 12 months.

Tom O’Hagan, Managing Director at Virtual1, commented “Virtual1 is 100% committed to providing the best service to our Partners and this award is a resounding recognition of everything we as a business have achieved over the past year. I am thrilled and delighted and would like to thank my whole team for their hard work and dedication to providing what is officially the best network provider for 2010 – 2011!”

For further information about the awards, please visit www.cnawards.com

The solution is a development for Virtual1 which has previously focused exclusively on its portfolio of network capabilities. Managing Director Tom O’Hagan explained the move:

“Over the past 12 months, we have had many of our Partners turn to us looking for advice on how best to support their customers as they adopt cloud services. Fast, resilient connectivity is a must, but so is secure hosting. By investing in our own Co-location facilities, we can offer our Partners all the advantages of an on-net hosting solution, including the enhanced speed, resiliency and security essential to cloud adoption.”

Virtual1’s Co-location services are provided via a Tier 4 data centre which boasts the latest state-of-the art facilities including multiple backup power capabilities, stringent security and environmental controls. What’s more, the data centre, which is ISO 9001 and BS 7799 compliant, is powered solely by alternative energy to reduce carbon emissions.

O’Hagan continued “Launching this new Co-location solution in response to demand from our Partners is the first step in a number of planned developments for our network and portfolio as a whole, as part of our overall commitment to supporting all the needs of our Partners and their customers.”

Virtual1 are offering free 100M Internet or MPLS  ports on all new Co-location orders until 1^st December 2011. For further information, please visit www.virtual1.co.uk or  call us on 0844 884 0800.

Adam will report directly to Chief Technical Officer James Hickman, who commented “I am delighted that Rich will be joining the Virtual1 team. I have worked alongside him for several years, and his knowledge and understanding of networks are second to none.”

Adam joins the team from Telstra International and has more than 15 years’ experience in the industry. One of his first projects will be masterminding the roll-out of a new switching layer, designed to increase the resilience and capacity of the Virtual1 network.

Managing Director Tom O’Hagan said ‘At Virtual1 we are committed to delivering the best possible network capabilities. The appointment of Rich Adam as Head of Network Architecture will ensure we continue to operate a network which exceeds the needs of our Partners and their customers.”

As well as offering the usual complimentary refreshments and will be:

• Providing live demonstrations of 1Portal, our realtime quotation tool
• Offering free 1Portal trials to any reseller
• Announcing the launch of our latest solution – visit the stand for more info!

Don’t miss Managing Director Tom O’Hagan, who will be participating in the Educational Speaking Programme at 11.30am on the first day, discussing the Channel Cloud Exchange.

We’ll also joined by one of the country’s leading magicians, who’ll be demonstrating his skills.

We look forward to seeing you there!

The Virtual1 Team

Managing Director, Tom O’Hagan, explained the decision: “We have been delivering these services for some time, but always as a bespoke solution. However with so much demand for high speed connectivity from our Partners, it was clear we needed to develop the standardised product. It’s now a standard feature on 1Portal, so it is both quick and easy for our Partners to access pricing.”

As with all Virtual1 networks, the 1Gb service is offered as both Managed and Wires Only, and will include free Quality of Service and SiP handoff as standard. For Partners needing greater capacity, Virtual1 is also able to offer access via 10Gb bearers.

For more information, call the team 0844 884 0800 or visit the Virtual1 website at www.virtual1.co.uk

Tom O’Hagan, Managing Director at Virtual1, commented “I am delighted to be a finalist at the CN Awards. We have worked hard over the past year to ensure we provide a service which supports our Partners in every aspect of their business, and it is excellent to see the hard work of my team reflected in this nomination.”

The awards ceremony will be held on 13^th October at the Park Lane Hotel in London. For more information visit www.cnawards.co.uk