Innovating with AzureHow Atmosera is using cloud technology to bring enterprise-level pipeline solutions to SMB customers

Shifting with the Landscape

US CSP partner Atmosera understands the

nature of the evolving technology landscape

better than most. Founded in 1995 as a

traditional ISP, Atmosera shifted their focus to

provide customers with colocation and

managed services in the early 2000’s. In 2010,

they pivoted yet again, working to provide

their customers with multi-tenant and private

VMware-based cloud solutions while

supplementing managed services on top of

those environments. Throughout all of these

permutations and evolutions, Atmosera has

always been committed to providing

excellent, 24x7x365 service- a standard that

they still hold today.

In 2012, Atmosera merged with a similar

company and both were acquired by a private

equity firm out of New York. Atmosera was

quick to evolve yet again – fixing their vision

on the potential of hybrid environments with

the objective of building the world’s leading

hybrid cloud platform.

Weighing the Options

Prior to this most recent shift, Atmosera had

been primarily a private cloud provider,

leveraging three of their own datacenters.

Deciding to pursue a hybrid cloud offer, they

knew they needed to find a public cloud

option they could trust and that could deliver

seamlessly on the hybrid promise. Perhaps

more importantly, they knew that their public

cloud provider had to be aligned to their

vision.

Initially, Atmosera investigated the

possibilities of using AWS but quickly realized

it was a poor fit for their hybrid cloud vision.

“We saw right away that they wanted

everything to live in AWS. At the time, they

didn’t believe in the hybrid cloud message

and didn’t take to the potential partnership in

the way we would have wanted.” – Jon

Thomsen, CEO, Atmosera

Beyond their differing visions regarding the

viability of a hybrid cloud platform, Atmosera

also found that AWS lacked a strong tie-in

with the enterprise and traditional business

markets that made up at least 50% of

Atmosera’s customer base. Pivoting from their

initial position, Thomsen and Atmosera began

pursuing the possibility of a partnership with

Microsoft.

“When we started looking into the possibility

of using Azure and working with Microsoft we

loved what we heard – particularly regarding

their hybrid vision. We also loved what Satya

was doing to develop a partner-friendly,

collaborative culture. The idea of being able to

combine a seamless hybrid cloud solution

that we could easily pivot to a full public

Azure offering via CSP provided us the

flexibility and value we were looking for.” – Jon

Thomsen, CEO, Atmosera

“When we started looking into

the possibility of using Azure

and working with Microsoft we

loved what we heard –

particularly regarding their

hybrid vision. We also loved

what Satya was doing to

develop a partner-friendly,

collaborative culture.”

Jon Thomsen

CEO

Atmosera

Azure-Certified for Hybrid Cloud

Embracing Azure as their public cloud

platform, Atmosera became one of the first

CSP partners. Having made the commitment,

they began building out capabilities around

Managed Azure and were the first partner

globally to deploy an Azure-certified for

hybrid cloud offering. Since making that

transition, Atmosera has been working to

build out a number of capabilities on Azure

through CSP, working towards their goal of

being the #1 partner for managed Azure.

“We always knew that eventually we would

want to build out our own products

leveraging Azure and over the last year we

have built out a number of different products

and SKUs designed to increase the utilization,

benefits, speed and functionality of Azure for

our customers. This includes successful

migration IP we refer to as ‘escape from AWS,’

a migration service enabling our new

customers to easily switch platforms. We will

continue to build IP, unique solutions, and

functionalities against the Azure platform -

over 50% of our customers are ISVs or SaaS

providers and we understand there is a

unique opportunity with Azure to best serve

those whose entire business model is the

application or a web-based platform.” – Jon

Thomsen, CEO, Atmosera

Simplifying the Development

Lifecycle

One of Atmosera’s more exciting, recent

innovations is their Release-Management-as-

a-ServiceTM. The service, targeted at

Atmosera’s extensive network of ISV

customers, is a best-of-breed platform-as-a-

service designed specifically for Azure and

enables their customers to take their

applications and web development projects

from inception to reality in an automated,

DevOps approach.

“Typically, in the past, when we managed

software development teams, we would need

to staff a release management or DevOps

engineers. For larger clients, this isn’t a

problem. For our smaller customers, however,

our Release-Management-as-a-ServiceTM is a

very attractive option as they are able to

receive all of the benefits and best practices of

a DevOps engineer but have it instead

deployed in a pre-packaged, affordable,

managed service environment.” – Scott

Harvey, VP of Engineering, Atmosera

“[…] For our smaller customers,

however, our Release-

Management-as-a-ServiceTM is a

very attractive option as they are

able to receive all of the benefits

and best practices of a DevOps

engineer but have it instead

deployed in a pre-packaged,

affordable, managed service

environment”

Scott Harvey

VP of Engineering

Atmosera

Atmosera’s services take advantage of

powerful automation tools native to Azure.

Atmosera works with their customers to

identify intended behavior and functionality in

their websites or applications. They then use

automated tools to test for the intended

functionality, allowing the application or page

to progress to the next stage of the DevOps

or release pipeline only if the conditions

identified by the customer have been met.

With this method, the customer retains

control by determining the conditions by

which their application passes from one stage

of development to the next while offloading

the burden of testing and staging to

automated processes.

Benefits of working with

Microsoft

As one of the first CSP partners, Atmosera has

worked very closely with Microsoft and has

been on the front lines as Azure continues to

grow and evolve. Their decision to choose

Azure over AWS, a decision initially rooted in

Microsoft’s hybrid cloud vision, has paid

dividends in the value they have seen from

the business partnership.

“Microsoft has been incredible over the last

three years and has demonstrated strong

partnership values. We are a managed

account and the support we have received

from the US Cloud and Hosting teams, the

WW team, and MPN have all been

outstanding.” – Jon Thomsen, CEO, Atmosera

Working on the front lines with Microsoft’s

newest technology, Thomsen and Atmosera

are the first to admit that the experience

hasn’t always been smooth sailing – with new

technology, deployed in complex ways, there's

always a learning curve. Atmosera

understood that going into the partnership

with Microsoft over three years ago. Atmosera

also knew that being somewhat of a pioneer,

that as Azure technologies advanced, they

flattened their learning curve, and became

experienced Azure experts, Atmosera would

be in a great position to deliver the power of

Azure to its customers. Working with

Microsoft has been a partnership that has

enabled both partners to thrive while

providing great value to their customers.

“Microsoft has been incredible

over the last three years and

has demonstrated strong

partnership values. We are a

managed account and the

support we have received from

the US Cloud and Hosting

teams, the WW team, and

MPN have all been

outstanding.”

Jon Thomsen

CEO

Atmosera