What's interesting here is that Rogers instantly gains a significant foot hold in the enterprise data centre and hosting market but also gains cloud computing capabilities via the Granite acquisition. One wonders if Rogers is moving into the enterprise managed services market and making a play for the lucrative long term hosting and services contracts that Bell and Telus have enjoyed for so long.
Recall that both Bell and Telus launched their cloud infrastructure products last year, which were really underwhelming as product offerings, and, as far as anyone can tell, haven't really gained much traction in the market. Probably because their respective IaaS offerings were marketed to increase demand for that oh-so-precious-commodity-with steadily-eroding-profit-margins: bandwidth. How's that working out now?
The questions now, are:
- Will Rogers use the same tactic and try to use the DC and IaaS offerings to drive bandwidth sales?
- Will Rogers use it to promote and grow a user community that will serve the ever-growing-with-steady-margins mobile market?
- Will Rogers use this foothold to drive managed services sales?
Time will tell. But the Telecom market is heating up!