White Glove Technologies Founded: 1993 url: www.whiteglovetech.com
For some MSPs, “cloud” is a new term for a service they’ve been offering for several years. White Glove Technologies has been offering private cloud services to its customers for years, and then began layering on complementary cloud offerings from Ingram Micro Cloud as the technology matured. CEO Tommy Wald explains that White Glove has a strong vertical focus in healthcare, which has meant offering support and services to customers with high availability needs and low IT staffing numbers. “We often support doctor’s offices with about 25-100 users in multiple sites, all with electronic medical records (EMR) solutions in place,” explains Wald. “We typically build those customers a private cloud in our data centers to support those multiple offices, and then provide them with high levels of availability that we manage.” For example, when a medical office has a line-of-business application that every office needs to utilize, hosting that application and delivering it through the cloud is a cost-effective and reliable solution. Additionally, White Glove can offer much stronger security in its data centers than most medical offices can manage on their own. Despite cloud’s nice fit with the healthcare vertical, Wald cautions other MSPs not to
Locations: Austin, Dallas, Houston, San Antonio
Specializations: Private cloud services offering tailored for healthcare
Key Market Vertical: healthcare, professional services, SMB
focus on the cloud when it comes to selling IT solutions into that market. “You have to talk to them about their needs, and then consider the different ways to resolve that,” advises Wald. Using the example of a business application needed in multiple offices, Wald suggests talking to the customer first about how to improve the availability of needed IT resources, then ease into topics such as security, bandwidth, on-premise security of confidential data, and more. “The bigger question is how can you architect the right solution; whether or not it involves cloud is a secondary factor,” he advises. “For healthcare it is all about connectivity and accessibility.” Today, White Glove augments its provide cloud offering with Ingram Micro Cloud vendors such as Intermedia. “We find that as we get into more robust environments and deal more with compliance, those vendors are a better fit than our solutions,” says Wald. In fact, he freely admits that if faced with today’s cloud offerings, White Glove would not have tackled the development of its own cloud services. “Today’s offerings, especially hosted Exchange, are so well architected, everything is baked right in. I would not make the tremendous investment to create our own cloud solutions in today’s landscape,” explains Wald. Instead, he relies on Ingram Micro Cloud, using its highly vetted new technology offerings as
a guide for potential opportunity with customers. “Ingram Micro helps me fill voids in my line card without making a tremendous investment, and it helps me consider what other solutions I should be providing my customers.”