MSPs LOOKING TO MOVE customers to the cloud “”get it,”” says Paul Van Hyfte (pictured), executive vice president of sales at US Signal, a data center services provider in Grand Rapids, Mich. “”They know that the cloud is obviously going to have tremendous growth over the coming years,”” he says, pointing to an uptick in adoption as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Founded in 2001, US Signal offers network, cloud, co-location, data protection, and managed and professional IT services, and is now five years into its MSP partner program, which Van Hyfte says is a segmented unit within the firm so as not to compete with its own managed services offering. Initially MSPs partnered with US Signal for infrastructure such as compute, memory, and storage, he says, but increasingly they’re taking advantage of data protection and backup and replication services too.
US Signal has three data centers in Michigan—Grand Rapids, Southfield, and Van Buren Township (opened in March)—plus data centers in Oak Brook, Ill., and Indianapolis. It will have expanded its cloud and data protection capabilities to all five by September. “”The beauty of what we do is we own and operate the network that connects all those data centers together, to get our customers an incredibly low-latency experience and also a very secure and private transport network between our data centers,”” says Amanda Regnerus, executive vice president of product and service.
Van Hyfte says US Signal offers partners simplified billing as well as no contract terms, and charges a flat fee based on consumption; partners can set their own pricing. The technical operations center is staffed with engineers who answer the phone within 60 seconds, he adds, and MSPs can access US Signal’s migration and professional services.
MSP partners range in size from 2- to 50-person companies, Van Hyfte says, noting that the ideal partner is seeking to embrace “”a cloud-first strategy.””
