Managed service providers and cloud vendors must consider their customers as much as customers must carefully evaluate which cloud services would be best-suited for their environment. For Vnetrix Limited, differentiating itself from other MSPs required a unique approach to customer as well as a flexible platform to enable Vnetrix to offer customers a variety of options.

"What makes Vnetrix different, particularly in the cloud market, is our relationship. We work with the clients right from the beginning. We work at that they want," said Rob Norman, co-founder and CEO of Vnetrix, in a recent CA Technologies Cloud Luminaries video.

Founded in 2002, Vnetrix realized in 2010 it also needed a cloud platform to truly serve its customers. "They may end up with a public cloud, they may end up with a private cloud, they may end up with a mix of something. What makes us different from other people is they can call us up, they can have a conversation. We can really work with them to get the right solution for them," Norman said.

Getting to that point required Vnetrix to find what it considered the ideal cloud platform to match its business model and best serve its customers. In the middle of 2010, the company started evaluating options, including Eucalyptus, VMware and CA AppLogic. The process helped Vnetrix settle on AppLogic as its platform of choice for several reasons.

"AppLogic delivers the benefit of scalability, reliability. We've had issues where the platform needs to failover; things have failed, but it does what it says, and it effectively what we'd call ‘self-heals,' and that was a big thing for us."

Norman said CA AppLogic enables his company to work better with customers and provide them with tailored services to best meet their needs. For instance, Universal Music needed a platform to scale fast, to be able to build new servers, remove servers, set up new infrastructure "and the only way we could do it was a cloud platform."

"The massive benefit for Universal Music was being able to deploy infrastructure quickly. Previously it could take us a couple weeks to put new services in, so Universal wanted something that we could deliver; they could then build their infrastructure in a matter of hours or days," Norman said.

Vnetrix said this relationship wouldn't be possible without the CA AppLogic platform.

"One of the big things for us with choosing AppLogic is the backing of CA. We needed an organization that was going to be there, would be there for long haul, was invested in the product, and with the support service, would be there, because we, our clients, had taken on trust that was are providing the right platform," Norman said.