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August 27, 2024
Getting Sh*t Done! Multi-tenancy for Proxmox with Hosted Network | Episode #89
Amidst the Broadcom VMware shake-up, Hosted Network steps up to the plate with a game-changing multi-tenancy solution for Proxmox, empowering MSPs to transition smoothly and keep getting sh*t done
Amidst the Broadcom VMware shake-up, Hosted Network steps up to the plate with a game-changing multi-tenancy solution for Proxmox, empowering MSPs to transition smoothly and keep getting sh*t done
Amidst the #Broadcom VMware shake-up, Hosted Network steps up to the plate with a game-changing multi-tenancy solution for #Proxmox, empowering MSPs to transition smoothly and keep getting sh*t done
Episode Summary: In Episode 89 of Great Things with Great Tech, we dive into the evolution of an Australian MSP in the cloud and telco services space. Ben Town, CEO of Hosted Network, joins us to explore how the company transformed from a traditional MSP into a leader in wholesale cloud and telco services. We also discuss their exciting new venture, MultiPortal.io, which is filling a crucial gap in the market with a multi-tenant Proxmox IaaS management solution, especially timely given the ongoing disruptions caused by Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware.
Ben shares the Hosted Network journey, starting as a local MSP in Sydney’s west in 2003, transitioning to a channel-only model in 2013, and growing into a key player in the Australian market. We also cover how MultiPortal.io emerged from their development team and is now providing an alternative hypervisor management tool designed to streamline operations for MSPs facing the challenges of today’s cloud environments.
Key Topics Discussed:
- Transition from MSP to Service Provider: Hosted Network’s shift from a direct customer model to a channel-only model, focusing on delivering wholesale cloud, voice, connectivity, and security solutions to over 250 Australian MSPs.
- MultiPortal.io: The development and impact of MultiPortal.io, a tool designed for managing multi-tenant Proxmox environments, which has become essential in the wake of Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware.
- In-House Development: Hosted Network’s evolution into a development-centric company, creating tools and platforms that address real-world challenges faced by MSPs, including automation, AI integration, and custom billing solutions.
- Alternative Hypervisors: The increasing relevance of Proxmox as a cost-effective, scalable alternative to traditional hypervisors like VMware, particularly in the APAC region.
- Challenges and Innovations: How Hosted Network navigated the challenges posed by the changing IT landscape and continued to innovate, creating solutions that empower MSPs to thrive.
Technology and Concepts Mentioned: Proxmox, VMware, Broadcom, cloud services, telco, MultiPortal, IaaS, MSP, TSP, virtualization, automation, AI, channel-only model. ☑️ Web: https://hostednetwork.com.au ☑️ MultiPortal: https://multiportal.io ☑️ Crunchbase: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/hosted-network ☑️ Support the Channel: https://ko-fi.com/gtwgt ☑️ Be on #GTwGT: Contact via Twitter @GTwGTPodcast or visit https://www.gtwgt.com ☑️ Subscribe to YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@GTwGTPodcast?sub_confirmation=1 Check out the full episode on our platforms: YouTube: https://youtu.be/kmB_pjGb5Js Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/2l9aZpvwhWcdmL0lErpUHC?si=x3YOQw_4Sp-vtdjyroMk3Q Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/darknet-diaries-with-jack-rhysider-episode-83/id1519439787?i=1000654665731 Follow Us: Website: https://gtwgt.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/GTwGTPodcast Instagram: https://instagram.com/GTwGTPodcast ☑️ Music: https://www.bensound.com
Transcript
it's not often that you come across an MSP whose slogan is get done but that's what drew me to hosted Network a local Australian MSP which is doing great things not only in the service provider space but also from the in-house development which is now servicing a gap in the market with regards to proxmox yes we're talking about broadcom again we're talking about its impact but we're also talking to a great Innovative MSP hosted Network and also focusing on Multi portal which is a spin-off and their solution for offering
multi-tenant proxmox support and in the year 2024 it's all about alternative hypervisors today I'm talking with Ben Town CEO of hosted Network don't forget to head to YouTube at jtw JT podcast or on all good podcasting platforms hit like subscribe and follow to get all past episodes and now episode 89 with Ben town from hosted Network hey Ben so Ben founder and CEO of hosted Network welcome to episode 89 of GT WGT it's been a while since uh I've talked to a service provider MSP in the purest Sense on the show um but also
from an Australian perspective as well great to be talking to an Australian service provider as well and you know also from a great ve partner at the same time though on the show that doesn't matter it's secondary but always good to have as well but welcome Ben thanks mate thanks for having me no worries so hey it's it's an exciting time for you guys um hosted Network have been around for a while um started off as an MS P went into sort of infrastructure hosting and and now um you know from we're going to
talk about this bit later on releasing um something for proxmox multiportal like we'll get into that later but firstly you know talk about a little bit about hosted Network what you guys do what you're doing today and then we'll look into you know where it all started for you yeah yeah sure so so hosted network is a wholesale cloud and Telco provider for Aussie manager service providers uh today we support over two 150 msps across Australia um and that's primarily everything from connectivity
through the infrastructure and the surrounding pieces so voice and security and so forth um we we are a fully feedback driven company so everything that we've built is pretty much being built inhouse based off the feedback from our partners um you know we uh we like to sort of uh what do they say fail fast and so that that's what we have we're probably more of a a development company that front ends as a cloud provider yeah we we we sort of way way way back when one of my first companies that I founded way before host of
network was actually a development company so we we kind of think a bit like that y yep yep yeah so that that sort of development mindset tooling and all of that is all kind of you know with that that in mind so yeah yeah yeah yeah so in 2003 started but it started as an MSP so this is pretty typical of a journey typical of a journey of of a man of service provider at that time um you know looking at it spaces to fill helping other msps to serve their own customer base what was it like back then what made you start and found um hosted
Network and also hosted network not networks which I think people yeah we're an IT company we're not the most original when it comes to marketing names y y yep yep yep you obviously you find that often because I made that same mistake as well just N I think we actually own the domain name finally now but yeah we all I was going to say it was it's worth a cheeky redirect I reckon it is it is so yes talk about 2003 yeah so 2003 so I didn't actually found the the manag service provider I founded hosted Network so I
was a I'm a network engineer and virtualization engineer by trade um and I got burnt out out of it and I decided to Res skill speaking of marketing and I went into marketing um and I actually started a marketing agency um and turned out the only people that I knew were in it so I was doing marketing for it and not really escaping not really escaping in any way shape or form um but there some really good back when you could you know make money off web hosting and things like that it was you know early days before Cloud was a thing and posted
network was actually born because one of my customers at the time who we were you know doing not just marketing but a lot of Consulting for I tried to tell them that cloud was going to be a thing and they didn't believe me and so I went cool I think cloud is going to be a thing and yeah we we sort of uh we we merged we bought into a manag service provider they started in 2003 and yeah we um we sort of uh started hosted Network a couple of years later after that so um and turns out Cloud was I think so I was you know I was pretty
happy with that gamble yeah I mean and look I mean obviously at that time 2006 I mean I I've been hosting like you know probably been hosting for a long time and actually since you know all my career and there was definitely interesting transitional periods around 20067 hosting um it was really moving from partner hosted Solutions just you know pretty much almost like backyarding type of thing because it was it was it was the Wild West lots of Hosting providers were popping up doing isps Linux based hosting Windows hosting
hosted um applications like exchange 20067 is really you know when AWS was just forming Microsoft was working out that they could probably do what Their Partners were doing and do it on a larger scale um so really interesting times but you know from the point of view of how you saw it then what Drew you into the world back then apart from obviously networking you were in that world from a technical perspective but then going hey you know I think I can take this and grow a company around it yeah so I guess you know the for us
it was one of those things that we thought we could do it better um I came from back on my Ms MSP days when I work in an MSP um everything we did was Enterprise uh and so a lot of the a lot of the hosting you're right it was you know the Wild Wild West and the a lot of the hosting that we were seeing was being built based off you know realistically desktop Hardware sold as you know physical infrastructural servers um in and in Australia that in many cases it wasn't in data centers data centers were still a very early
concept not nowhere near the numbers that we've got now and um so for us it was to try and bring that Enterprise level of solution to the SMB right and that's where we felt we could make our Mark and we did it worked really really well as as an MSP um we when we sort of came together with that MSP we um we quickly basically sold we were citric shop at the time actually okay yeah zen zen app at the time uh and so we we quickly very quickly moved everyone into that sort of cloud sort of model um delivering as a what we called at the
time desktop as a service yeah right so um before vdi uh and that flowed on from there we um we wanted more performance basically right and we started uh we were the back in the day when VMware bought a company called destone I know I know well got got lots got lots of links to that that's for sure very well so we we were one of the launch Partners in Australia for when VMware purchased that that company for their um desktop as a Ser Horizon D back then yes yes and um so we were you know we brought like a or netup um they brought
solid fire for a tidy 1.2 billion so we were the launch partner for for all flash arrays back then and we were doing some crazy all around BDI and a lot of that sort of um our service offering even today was tied into that sort of infrastructure piece of it right so with vdi obviously it's a it's a user experience based thing right so we then had to bring in our own contivity to control latency to get you know have more control so from a you know there was no finger pointing those sort of things when oh so we want to control and
that's kind of how things grew so today we don't do much in terms of vdi we're actually sort of end of life in most of it as host network but that was kind of as a you know infrastructure provider kind of how we grew trying to bring that you know that Enterprise play to the SMB and that's always difficult like I I was in that space as well I mean I think you know I think about my first few days at zetag grid when I we're now talking early 20 mid 2013 we were using the The Horizon View had just released I
remember deploying that software uh we were using VMware Cloud director to fronted it was It was kind of going to be that next big thing but and then I remember having an iPad and Horizon app on the iPad and you can do your desktop there on the iPad it was all kind of it was brilliant like it was good times um but I I guess it's always it was always hard to balance up user expectation business expectation around what was a hosted desktop delivering the apps and what that actually meant and then obviously as a hosting provider how do
you actually deliver on that promise and N times out of 10 it was wasn't it was always dispar difficult to do because all the normal you know problems around hosting things storage um Co tency no noisy neighbors it all came up right so to your point if you dedicated yourself towards that you could actually end up growing your infrastructure quite nicely and creating some real scale on some really nice platform there right automation you know just process if you were half in it which is basically what most people were um and not really
focused on it as a main line of business then you probably failed pretty quickly at it like I know that that we did it never took off right it was kind of cool so you know you guys were the ones that actually took deathstone and took those calls from where probably from a probably back then right and yeah yeah definitely you know he over at now right so oh no he was at v he's at Snak now how you oh right mov on again yeah he moved on again he's looking after Snak but yeah but it was him but yeah trying
to sell it in and you know I know that we kind of looked at it and went no not for us lots lots of lots of lots of uh we need to do a lot here to get this going and I call Focus but good on you for doing that so okay so B Desktop Service pretty critical to to to leverage that from an MSP point of view and then in that around that time you definitely transition to a channel only model so what does that mean when a company like yourself and MSP transitions into that sort of model so we effectively moved away from
selling direct to end customers and selling through Partners right so the reason for that was if I put my marketing hat on back from you know our marketing agency days um we we converted all of those existing you know End customer leads that our manag service provider had and then we we tried to go after more leads um you know online advertising things like that um and what we were finding is that you know every sort of you know third lead that was coming through was for a managed service provider going oh hey I can see a lot of
those you know benefits um to a hosted vdi solution but they didn't have the budget they didn't have the the technical KN you know skills um or they just have the time to sort of to learn it and so they were kind of like okay well can you deliver that for us and it was through that sort of market demand that we went oh there's a bit of a gap here and initially what it was just vdi you know the the desktop as a service offering we kind of expanded from there pretty quickly um and we we pretty much
stopped doing any retail we we split off that and focus 100% on on channel um you know selling through those manag service providers so that really helped us align you know I love talking about common language so we're talking if anyone's talking about you know targeting a vertical you know it really did allow us to kind of go deep because we could understand the pain points that they were going through and we could talk the same language if anyone's trying to I don't know support the receptionist with
a printer issue you know you're not you know it's always frustrating when you're talking Tech to Tech you're you could really get things done and so we we got to be the propeller heads and we let them do the that's interesting right and then so did you guys have a front end or a control panel at the time that you that you kind of you know allowed so to speak credit card swipe or active payments of the infrastructure the service or the desktop as a service whatever you were doing back then or was
it still was it not as evolved back then and that made it easy to sort of go towards that channel because you kind of close that end and then focus on the channel it was there was definitely a transition um we used a um for still around now this brings me back to web hosting days um HS yep yep yep a billing platform and we we transitioned away we had some pretty major issues this is a long time ago bring me back now um and we that's what we do here I love going back to Memories um yeah we we basically made
the decision because of some issues that we were facing with that and we kind of went n all in and we we expanded our Dev team and our devops team to basically turn around and go let's just build everything in house so me that was that's important oh I can't remember how many years ago it was now um but we basically went up let's we want control right and the same the same reason we were doing Telco right we wanted that control because we wanted to deliver on those customer outcomes um so that
ordering life cycle everything from how customers order through how they you know troubleshoot through to how they Bild you know all everything that we do is custom built inh house control it end to end well yeah and because we're going after a vertical like managed service providers they operate in a particular way right so we wanted to sort of go deep with their user experience and really align um you know host a network fundamentally makes our partners more profitable not because of the services that we sell it's the fact that when
they do buy something from us it's so well aligned to that end to end service life cycle to how they operate that they get those operational efficiencies across the board you know time to resolutions quicker you know invoicing the cost of reconciliation all of those and pieces at decrease because we've G so deep with how they operate um and that there was nothing out of the box that we could do that so you know and we in a way we did stumble into that sort of piece of it but it was that mindset of going no we want control we want to
be able to respond to feedback quicker you know rather than waiting for someone else's development cycle we could kind of turn around and go you know what yeah that's a good idea let's give it a go let's get that out in Market um yeah and I think that's true of any any MSP or any traditional MSP that got into hosting or got into PBX Cloud Telco um really had to do it um and fail quickly in certain parts to understand what they were lacking right and it's the same as here in Australia it's it's the same in
a States and in Europe if you were an MSP focus with people you know it only went so far because those types would go oh we can do the hosting it seems easy no worries we'll do it and then typically these guy and I've seen it I've seen hundreds of these companies think they can do it and then ultimately it all sort of blows up in their face because either they're not scaled correctly they're not they haven't got the right engineering they haven't got the right development the right levels
of automation procurement whatever it is um and then there's the other ones which were born from say a development company and there's the company that I used to work from zedig grid actually episode number one of this podcast now almost four over four years ago zedig grid was born because there was developers in that initial MSP company that were doing Automation and they thought maybe we can apply this to the cloud and and this thing that's coming up or else I think you've you kind of went the other way
where you you kind of tried a little bit and said we've got to get better at the automation piece and we're going to do everything in house and if you don't do either one of those things we I found that those msps that tried hosting just failed pretty badly right yeah and I think that a lot of like particularly these days and if you you know thanks to Microsoft and what you know they've done with the Zur and whatnot they they really did shine a light on a lot of those msps um or tsps as they want you know people
often call they are tsps now that was my last episode tech technical service providers technical that's it that's it um that sort of it challenged their way of thinking you know and realizing that for the same reason that U most managed service providers don't want to run a Telco Network because you've got to have Network Engineers you've got to take that next level up of technical skill um and that you need realistically you need a decent amount of volume to actually be able to justify that level of investment
and and continually reinvesting in that not just in terms of you know equipment but the skill right if you look at our the industry as a whole it's it changes so rapidly and when we're dealing with kind of very very technical aspects whether it be you know networking or um you know data center services and things like that um it's a different kettle of fish to say to you know typical 365 tenant Administration migrations Project work things like that so it's you know they're very you know
complimentary but they're a different fundamentally they're a different skill yeah absolutely so in terms of the services you guys offer and we won't spend a lot of time on this but I think it's important to talk about the services so infrastructures of service desktop as a service which you said you're kind of transitioning out of and the reason why we're quite close today from a partnership perspective I'm mean meaning ve and ourselves you do backup as a service um but then you've also got
the Telco side which is the host of PBX siip Trunks mbn and all kind of jazz so very well rounded in terms of your service offerings and that go to shop for for your MSP Partners there um and obviously the the development arm is very important in that like what what part of the business would you say today is is is is innovative more more than the other or or is it just end to endend you know in terms of the services that you're offering so certain I mean connectivity and voice for example are definitely more
commoditized um so we have to innovate in that sense more to make sure that we have uh a better value proposition in Market uh we have to make sure that we're not burning margin you know um because you know basically you can you can take one support call for for an internet connection you can lose that margin particularly being in wholesale so we've got to work smart right so um where we're investing you know in our platform more and more um you know the headcount in our development team is probably increasing at at at a much
faster rate than anyone any other department in our company um and that's because you know where we're trying to take advantage of things like AI you know we're trying to take you know improve the um the user experience so that when tickets come through we're not having to touch as many of them um you know you mentioned NBN we we have the best fault to service ratio of any Telco in Australia because of that okay of any even versus the big guyses right and that's because where that means we don't
just go and pass the buck to NBN right because at the end of day we want to make sure that if we are passing it through it it's a legitimate issue and our pooling in the way that we work and the way that we operate allows us to deliver a better time to resolution which again because we're going deep within MSP that's what they care about because fundamentally time is money for a managed service provider obviously customer that impacts them as well but you know manage service provider has to support that service so for us that sort
of time of resolution and our way of thinking so we're really having to be quite you know creative in that sense uh and you know we are leveraging things like AI we're looking at you know when someone uploads you know photos of a router for example we automatically you know we're trying to look at what what the what the lights are on the router what are the that's cool those sort of things and then we look back at the the apis that we get from mbn and go cool let's automatically run the Diagnostics
we you know automatically pass our logs from our assist logs to try and compile what that actually looks like to to get to a faster resolution than swiving things yeah AI big proponent of using it like the tooling that we have at the moment is is crazy in terms of what we can do with it and being able to leverage it to make things more efficient is super important um in terms of your development so we're going to talk about m multiportal in a sec well in a couple of minutes I want to cover broadcom before we get to the flow
into multiportal because it's it's it's a beautiful narrative um but what what other things that you mentioned in the pre-chat you know we've become this development company first and foremost and then obviously that offshoots into the MSP world has there been anything that you guys have actually developed like that has become obviously multiportal as one is there anything else that's that you've done in that sort of vein as well yeah so we um we have a well no longer because we sold it
late last year um it was an alert platform called um alert Centric right so we were we would take um all the backup alerts and things like that for beam and you know um dat whatever whatever it these basically and simplify and try and remove the errors out of backup checks um and that that was a spin-off just internally because we were you know frustrated with internal issues uh and then we found the same pain point so that's sort of and we've got some other there's another platform that we build internally uh called project
guardian where we basically filter against CIS logs and security um alerts um automatically black holing potential you know threat actors across our national network um but also you know offet scan for vable ities open ports um highrisk services and present that information back to our partners so that they can proactively um you know monitor those services and and ideally patch them um our thinking again because we we're Channel focused is that if our customers are impacted or if they lose a customer we lose a customer so looking
at those different ways of being creative of sort of going okay cool how can we add extra value but how can we you know make our our customers look like Heroes so do they become spin-offs out you know how how it's kind of like skunk working a little bit right internally where you're creating you know maybe from a from a hackathon internally or just some some you know free time someone's getting in there and creating that sort of stuff lots of pizza lots of pizza yeah love the pizza love that as long as it's Pizza it's
it's all good but then do you spin that out do you then do you then take that like you mentioned you you sold one that's really cool that you're able to do that is there more value when you guys clearly there's some value but what's the mental sort of from a business perspective spinning that out versus keeping it and growing it internally um I'm interested in that yeah um so most of all of these ideas come from our feedback from our partners realistically they they come from um pain points that's happening in Market
or where we see that there's there's a gap um someone's complaining about something that you know they wish there was something like this you know we have a uh we integrate with all the major PSAs for example from a billing perspective right and that came because one of our our partners frankly forgot to build a fiber service for 500 bucks a month for two years you know it hurts right so a lot of that stuff is from that level of feedback and then we sort of we we do go through that sort of skunk work that sort of
hackathon approach where an ID we like to sort of do that mvp approach me more viable product and get it in people's right so um feedback cycle is basically you know get something in there what we think might be a great idea if we spend years and years and years on it we could get it in market and everyone might turn around and go no and that's what we've found in in many cases if I look at say our whether it be our PS I'll use our PSA Integrations um managed service providers even though they're one
vertical they they configure their PSAs in totally different ways right so and everyone builds in slightly different ways as well um and so you know we have to accommodate for those things so what we do is we try and we get some early adopters and we get that sort of feedback cycle going and then we just continually innovate from there um we we build build and build you know that kind of my my team would you know they'd laugh at me saying this because I say it way too often but you know crawl before you walk walk before you run um you know
get that minimal viable product get it in people's hands see what they think um and then get real world feedback um because at the end of the day when not necessarily the ones using it day and day out yeah that's that's interesting let's let's let's turn it to you know multiportal but before we talk about that really interesting itself and and a great example of you know filling a space in the market which potentially needed to be filled because of necessity right talk about broadcom I mean it's
been it's been talked a lot this year I've focused on it with a lot of um you know platforms alternative hypervisors and whatnot how has it directly impacted your business your msps and their customers it's a pain in the ass you can say that a lot of a lot of sleepless nights early on mainly because obviously the broad situation was not knowing what the hell was going on and even today it's still there's a lot of unknown fluid right fluid it is a very fluid situation um so from our perspective we we didn't know
what was going on right so we knew something was coming uh and we we had to sort of go okay what's our risk profile looking like um and which is in the in the end you know if I look at our um our desktop as a service platform um that's why we end up life it because the broad it became too hard um for the you know uh in terms of multiportal we started early on we had we had a side project already one of those sort of you know hackathon sort of um projects internally that we working on and we we we were looking for Al
alternatives to VMware and vcloud director for probably probably about three years ago we sort of started the concept um and then we we sort of we we were just expecting someone to to provide that functional I just assume that and it's still surprises me today that there isn't someone else out there that sort of built for something other than VMware yeah I mean I mean there was there was onapp um and there was a few others that existed but then VMware acquired onapp and kind of kind of destroyed it internally there's a few
there that did do this but they just because VMware was able to there was a period definitely when I remember being in the thick of this with zedig grid being at VM World showing them what we had bought from an NSX point of view when NSX was out and how he integrate it and and then they went through a period saying that they were going to not no longer develop the UI it was going to be all API based if you remember that they so they caused lots of fud in the market then more uncertainty and doubt and fear about which way you're going but then
they double down on that on said no the UI is strong we're going to go down hard with it and here's what they've done and then they they to their credit they did that and I think that basically stopped anyone really looking seriously at innovating to fill that space which was potentially going to be void because of the the the API only approach because let's be honest with you the UI and experience has been pretty damn good since they made that decision right done they've done really well so broadcom has
come in now and caused different different waves you know in terms of it's not really about vcd anymore it's about what's underneath it that's the problem right that's thec so that's where we're at today but yeah I mean from that point of view I mean from an alternative hypervisor perspective you know obviously you've you've seen something in proxmox but have what are people actively moving away from VM where I obviously think the answer that you're going to sell me is yes but how
do you take that how do you see that in Market with your 250 msps so we originally funny you mentioned back when the VM weren't using the UI a little bit of History um we we we built a a full front end for to sort of to and so we already sort of had those skills in internally and you know a bit of the code I guess as well but we um when this approach happened we we're quite heavily involved with a lot of the um the MSP communities the business communities the P groups and whatnot um the and the feedback was no we're just
going to ditch our whole stack or you know you know we're moving to something else we're done people were just frustrated um and so we we put up a you know a couple of Reddit posts sneakily in the VMware sub subreddit and whatnot and we had so many people contact us and we realized like you know what cool all right we're already working on this internally we're just going to make it a an external project um and since then just like with anything else we do we've just uh We've it's a feedback loop right
so proxmox as a platform I think a lot of people are looking at it as an alternative and a lot of people already run it realistically yeah yeah a lot of people were running management work I know we have for years right um running management work on and like that so I think a lot of those skills it was a n a natural progression um the other one that we saw in Market was obviously you know hyperv and I know Microsoft some things you know on the on the RO yeah trying they're trying yeah um but there's never been
kind of that much of a buy in for hyperv whereas I felt that of people a lot of the you know hosting providers or Telos or you know manag service providers that we were you know in our community were already using prop MOX so was a natural sort of progression for them isn't that interesting I just want to sort of ask there is it so from the point of view of Hosting management Stacks maybe the Telco stack on a prox MOX um was that from a price perspective just the best way to do it I mean I know you know there's technical reasons why
but for me if I was thinking about it today like do I really want to include you know certain VMS that are doing this sort of workload in my vmw reporting every month because holy crap that's a bit more expensive and it seems like it's going to be okay on the prox MOX thing it's running fine other people are doing it you know the mentality there I I think leads itself to that but I'm curious as to why you guys and others go down that path especially in apj like a and z I'll say parts of the
Mia not so much in America not so much in the Northern parts of Asia it's a very there's clumps of this happening in the world but it's not all over the place at the same time yeah you're right I think that cost definitely is probably the starting point for most people um to sort of start management workloads I don't want to have to to to you know to pay a premium at the end of the day businesses are typically for profits uh and so that sort of comes into it from that aspect of it um the other thing I think about
you know when it when it comes to proxmox is that like ASX it is a great TurnKey solution you know if I look at the likes of open stack and what not there's a lot of moving yeah nasty it requires a very deep investment in technical skills right and they it's not just the cost of those skills it's the availability of those skills I think that was something the being we really had that was you know you learn it in at at University or college or whatever it might be right whereas you know now unfortunately I
think a lot of that's going to disappear and so it was the natural hypervisor for a lot of people because that's what we run our Labs on at home and that's starting to to transition if you think of that sort of um trajectory that you know the uni students had their Labs running on you know VMware that heavily over proxs now a lot of people do that and in that sense and that's probably because it is quite a turnkey solution right so it's a you can you can stand it up it's you know you don't need 100
different moving Parts you don't have to install a UI and you don't have to install a separate this and a separate that um and that's kind of what we were you know attracted to it for um we were already running those management workloads but that sort of go to market time frame um was very attractive right and I think that with they did a great you know a little bit sneaky they jumped on the the broom B bandwagon as well when they did their live import script um and that kind of really cemented that
and there's a lot of initially early people who sort of saying oh hey what do that migration par app but they've made a really clean job they made it easy yeah they've made it easy right and I know that you could move into you could move into open stack and if you've got those skills already and you've got that made that investment then that probably already makes sense for you but so talk yeah so so talk about yeah multiportal um we got about seven or eight minutes left talk about multiportal and what
that is and why he decided to go down the path and why you also decided to to make it kind it is it is a separate kind of entity that I can see to host a network yeah so multiportal is our multi-tenanted uh you know BCL director competitor for crms um we we were building it internally for us U like I said it came out of some Reddit posts and due to frustration I think we we're talking to some major providers out of you know Europe and the US um and that a lot of other people are feeling the pain our Our intention is to take a lot of
the I guess the headaches that we've had as a you know as a provider as a cloud provider um that we've leared from the VMware world and try and simplify a few of those bits and pieces as well keeping in that sort of TurnKey solution um so you know if anyone's actually deployed our Alpha of it it's very kind of next next next you're done go you can kind of use it um whereas if you think of like the anyone that's used a bcloud director that the update and the maintenance and the installation is a lot more there's a
lot more to it absolutely we wanted to keep it kind of nice and simple and TurnKey um the the goal is to really provide a an easy to use multi-tenanted you know that a a management interface that allows for a nice clean transition from vcloud director or whatever might be zo realistically um to allow sort of whether it be managed service providers or or you know cloud service providers to sort of run their own workloads on proxmox um and we've got we've got some plans that we're we're sort of uh
looking at how we can do the same thing with fper in the samei and those well they're early early days at this stage but the intention is to sort of to try and keep it as as a separate piece of it we don't want to sort of get into the weeds of that the I think propm does a good job or you know h does a good job of of what they do so it's about the it's about the management and the billing and the provisioning of those workloads I think where the Gap is it is right and and if you go back to our you
know managed service provider roots and that what hosted network does it focuses on that endtoend service life cycle to get that operational efficiency right so we're sort of trying to take the same you know train of thought with you know multiportal uh and making sure that it's easy realistically um easy to manage workloads easy to provision easy to stand up you know yeah and are you running yourselves uh or is this something that you would obviously sell to other providers as well so I think maybe a bit of both potentially but yeah
so provider goes to you goes onto multiportal to IO has a look at it downloads installs it can then work out to connect is it can you connect uh proxmox environments that are disparate to the network so on premises all into one or is it all kind of more about a hosted proxmox solution much like what VMware would be doing with vcd closer to what uh VMware would be doing with vcd I guess um so you at the end of the day it's a um you bunto install at this stage um that is prepackaged um the packages on you bun a
clean and Bun you install uh and you can connect mul portal to you know as long as you've got connectivity to your propx environments um then you can manage multiple there right so so if you got the network together you could you could basically have one hosted somewhere and then if you had the network connectivity to multiple clients you could basically hook it in and and give your you know your customer a single you know management URL to go hey these are your workloads and then it doesn't matter where they are they can
kind of manage them uh you know across all of those locations from a yeah I love it because it's obviously you know there's proxmox don't have that themselves right so for you to come and build that on top of that and fill a hole is is really Innovative in itself right and I think goes back to what you were talking about earlier about you know your transition from an MSP initially into all the hosted Services understanding that you know like we talked about from from a Hoster to succeed they need that automation
development arm nowadays and you know through a through a little side project and a gap you've brought out what I I see has been quite an interesting project but I think it can be quite successful as well because it fills that immediate Gap that people need today in the market which is how do we get off VMware we want to we love elements of it I'm going to miss certain parts of it and this is probably the biggest part I'm going to miss so what what are my options out there and now basically M multiportal can do that from a proxmox
perspective yes it's the intention is that it's a you know uh I mean at the end of the day we we we are a VMware house we have been for a long long long time um but brom's caused a lot of unknown yeah you know a lot of sleepless nights and I think that um you kind of don't know what they're going to do even if you do stick with them for the time being so we we we we wanted to provide another path for ourselves uh and you know like I said based off that feedback that we've been getting anyway um and so
it's it's designed to be simple um that that provides an as close as possible experience but not directly copying it um we think there's a lot of things that can be improved and which we've done um you know you're talking about MVP feedback MVP feedback and that's the feedback cycle now right we're getting you know we're in that sort of Rapid development sort of getting you know we take an initial version we get it in people's hands and we collect that feedback and we stir and repeat you know
we're at uh uh we were probably at beta I think our beta launch is probably in about two weeks uh and so we're probably our initial if I stop adding features and keep getting shiny coin and stop getting excited over things we'll probably be a production in uh you know couple months so awesome awesome good stuff hey I love I love this conversation we're out of time I think one of the things that I love about hosted networks one of the unique value props is your you get done and that's like it's on your website you're
not so Aussie I love it get done that's what you guys are doing and you're doing it in the proxmox space you've been doing it MSP space for since 2003 looking forward to seeing where multiportal goes and what you guys are doing in the MSP space but Ben hey it's been great to have you on for episode 89 of great things with great Tech thanks for having me hey just as a reminder thanks for listening to this episode stay tuned for more episodes where we continue to highlight companies and Technology shaping our world don't
forget to follow us on social media at jtjt podcast and visit jtw j.com for more great content and all past episodes if you enjoyed this episode make sure to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform and on YouTube please spread the word and if you feel like it drop a review thanks for joining us and we'll see you next time on great things with great Tech [Music]
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