Dimension Data had some news it was eager to spread two weeks ago at Interop (News - Alert) 2011 in New York City; the IT services and solutions provider is diving head first into the enterprise cloud hosting market thanks to its acquisition of OpSource.

“Our focus here today is on our cloud services capabilities,” Larry Van Deusen, national practice manage, Network Integration, Dimension Data, told TMCnet during Interop. “We recently acquired OpSource (News - Alert) and acquired BlueFire and our focus here today is around cloud enablement – helping our clients in terms of their journey toward the cloud and areas of adoption that we can provide to them.”

A specialist in the IT infrastructure space, Dimension Data offers services for 49 companies in 150 countries. Recently acquired by the NTT (News - Alert) group, Dimension Data has been operating since 1983.

Since acquiring OpSource, Dimension Data has been able to focus on bringing a catalogue of services to enterprise customers. The company is particularly focused on using OpSource’s cloud hosting capabilities to help the enterprise adopt private and hybrid clouds.

And whether a customer wants to pay as they go or have the application hosted on premise or in the cloud, Dimension Data (News - Alert) stands ready to provide cloud enablement.

“We are in the year of the cloud,” Van Deusen said. “… We have been doing cloud based networks and helping clients build private cloud networks for 25 years.”

Dimension Data's customers span the multiple industries such as financial, pharmaceuticals, and manufacturing.

As Dimension Data looks to expand its customer portfolio and urge more and more companies to go the hybrid cloud offerings, part of its task is to spread the word about hybrid cloud offerings.

“Customers have been very receptive to hybrid,” Van Deusen said. “Compliance, security and comingling data are big concerns, and the idea of hybrid is allowing them to make decision and recommendations based on their company. Where it makes sense where they have data retention or concerns about data leakage they will use private cloud; where they can outsource and leverage public information they will use public cloud.”

“It’s a combination of service offerings and that’s why hybrid is well received,” he added.

Since every CIO has cloud on the top of their list in terms of where their business needs to go, according to Van Deusen, Dimension Data’s job of advising and consulting becomes easier.

When prospective clients come to the company, officials ask the clients questions about what their strategy is and where they are in the adoption phase.mThen, Dimension Data introduces cloud to help them in that adoption.

“Our clients are looking for ways to create strategic advantage and reduce costs and cloud is a new entry point for them as far as a strategy to help them with that goal,” Van Deusen said.

“Most often than not when we have our discussion with our key clients, we were involved in that communications plan about what their strategy should be,” he added. “What we see ourselves as is a trusted advisor to the cloud… developing strategic client road maps.”

So what’s next for Dimension Data as 2011 comes to a close?

With cloud hosting capabilities in hand, Dimension Data is looking forward to extending the amount of services it offers as well as increasing what it can take to market to its customers.

“We are a strong IT services organization, and we are looking at expanding that to create additional market share,” Van Deusen said. “We will continue our growth strategy in organically growing to align with our clients’ needs.”

“A lot of our clients are multinational; we are embarking on expanding our base of multi-vendor technologies,” he added. “We will continue to expand the portfolio of products and offerings that we can offer to our clients.”