CloudGenix Unveils CloudBlades For Cloud-Delivered Branch Offices

‘We've been asking ourselves what the future of the branch looks like, and if you can deliver all infrastructure services that a branch needs from the cloud using best of breed providers, it will obviously be very, very transformative,’ CloudGenix CEO Kumar Ramachandran tells CRN.

CloudGenix is reimagining remote office IT infrastructure, which has historically been delivered by complex hardware or software stacks, into an entirely cloud-based, best of breed environment.

The SD-WAN specialist on Wednesday launched CloudBlades, a platform that can give branch offices all the IT services they need, such as cloud-based SD-WAN, security, and voice services, as well as multi-cloud access and operational tools in one place, without any additional hardware or software, the San Jose, Calif.-based provider told CRN.

Customers will be able to take advantage of cloud economics, and not just for the WAN, said Kumar Ramachandran, founder and CEO at CloudGenix.

"Enterprises truly are trying to change the nature of the remote office and are thinking about the full stack of services that they need," Ramachandran said. "You need SD-WAN, but you also need pervasive security, reliable communication and collaboration, and increasingly, high-speed, multi-cloud capabilities."

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Many businesses have been relying on hardware, like integrated services branch routers to deliver IT services at their remote office locations. But these customers are limited by the hardware's lifecycle, and typically, IT services have to come from the same IT vendor, Ramachandran said.

"We've been asking ourselves what the future of the branch looks like, and if you can deliver all infrastructure services that a branch needs from the cloud using best of breed providers, it will obviously be very, very transformative," he said.

Enterprises can build their IT services for their branch offices through individual CloudBlades, which offer pre-integrated delivery of best-of-breed cloud services to the branch CPE. That eliminates the need for complex integration work by the end customer or their channel partner, Ramachandran said.

CloudGenix today offers a set of more than twenty different CloudBlades that span various infrastructure services, including services from the likes of Palo Alto Networks, Zscaler, CheckPoint, Symantec, Microsoft, Equinix, Amazon, RingCentral, ServiceNow, PagerDuty, and Slack. Customers and partners can also build their own custom CloudBlades through the CloudGenix’s CloudBlade Developer Program.

The CloudBlades platform is already helping Three Tree Tech, a Portland, Oregon-based solution provider and CloudGenix partner, with its mission to simplify IT operations for its base of customers, said Bob Kingery, managing partner of Three Tree Tech.

"With the platform, we can deliver best-of-breed infrastructure services from the cloud with no additional hardware or software," Kingery said. "That’s a huge benefit as we help our clients through their digital transformation."

CloudGenix, which does 100 percent of its business through the channel, said that the opportunity around CloudBlades is huge because they can develop unique "blades" for their customers based on the services they'd like to use, including some examples that CloudGenix is already seeing from early adopters, like integrations with Amazon Alexa.

"Where a partner wants to offer incremental services to a customer, they don't have to buy any additional hardware or software once CloudGenix is installed at the branch," Ramachandran said. "If a partner wants to upsell a customer security, voice, or any IT operational tool, all they do is click a button to enable those services."