CloudJumper is a Garner, North Carolina-based workspace-as-a-service or WaaS platform vendor that is looking to provide a new business opportunity for channel partners and managed services providers (MSP) in Canada.

Workplace-as-a-Service, in a nutshell, is a form of desktop virtualization where a user can log-in and get access to apps and data in a secure way. One thing it’s not is desktop-as-a-service or DaaS. Max Pruger, the chief revenue officer (CRO) of CloudJumper, said during the EChannelNews podcast, think of a pizza box with just ingredients like dough and tomato sauce and from there you have to make your own pizza. Compare that to a pizza box with a fully assembled pizza. That’s WaaS.

“WaaS all started out with VDI, which is one dedicated server for one user. This did not provide great economics and led to DaaS, which was really a terminal service that users could log into. That helped the economics of it, but it’s an empty shell because you have to add all the tools. The next step is WaaS where you get active directory, backup, all the patches and 2,500 apps. This is an effective service that is usable,” Pruger said.

According to Pruger, CloudJumper’s WaaS offering can improve the stickiness of solution providers and MSPs by serving it up as an application framework. Service providers can build on to grow the business practice with each customer, while reducing complexity and costs for the customer.

CloudJumper’s new Cloud Workspace Suite is also a full-featured WaaS designed for channel partners who have a practice or professional service that can help to simplify the deployment and management for this community with an all-in-one customer management module.

Called JumpStart, it’s an onboarding solution for ground-to-cloud migration to WaaS. This will come with a competitive per seat pricing strategy and back-end system, which has the potential for partners to earn above average margins in the industry for WaaS delivery.

Another strategy Pruger has for partners is the migration from Citrix to CloudJumper. The company is now providing a tool called the Cloud Resource App (CRA) which enables partners to speed migration from Citrix by uploading active directory data directly into the Cloud Workspace Management Suite (CWMS). Once the migration is complete, CWMS becomes the primary management platform for application management on the network. The CRA tool eliminates the complexity and concerns of migrating from a fully populated Citrix workspace environment to CloudJumper to allow for maximum uptime.

Also on the podcast, Pruger talks about partners and professional services strategy, the acquisition of Independence IT, and the new features being made available by CloudJumper.