Helga Muir of Servecentric explains how its new cloud computing platform will operate.
Servecentric, the data-centre managed-services company, is making a €1m phased investment in its new cloud computing platform Kloudcentric.
Servecentric has completed phase one, which includes a €250,000 investment to bring the service to market.
The company is targeting Ireland’s value added reseller (VAR) channel with the new Kloudcentric service. These VARs will own-brand the service and sell to Irish business seeking to reduce capital expenditure and to enterprises that need to significantly scale their IT infrastructure.
Developed over 18 months, Kloudcentric has been built on Fort Technologies’ ‘MyWorld’ cloud management software. This enables Servecentric’s channel partners to deliver a one-stop-shop solution for designing, costing, building and managing complete IT infrastructures for multiple customers using both the technical and business tools within the software.
Helga Muir, sales and marketing manager, Servecentric, answers some questions on the new platform:
Who is the end customer?
Servecentric has adopted a channel-only approach to the market where we partner with the leading managed services providers and value added resellers in Ireland and internationally. These clients bring to the service a rich range of end customers from across most industry verticals such as financial, manufacturing, legal, technology and media sectors. We have yet to see a vertical where cloud services cannot be applied.
What is the application?
Our application enables the channel partner to deliver a complete private cloud IT environment within a management console from the Servecentric infrastructure. Their client’s environments are designed, built and managed through the software. The experience is an intuitive drag-and-drop builder that assembles the environment, an interactive console to manage the environment and real-time reporting and monitoring on the status of the client’s complete IT environment. It reinforces the ‘trusted adviser’ position of the partner with their end user clients with complete knowledge where their data is stored and managed.
As a sales tool for our partners the sales cycle is also addressed within the software, salespeople can do real-time design and costing of the environment in the presence of customers or buy price and sell price margin analysis on the fly.
Why was cloud chosen as an approach?
Market analysis and customer feedback has demonstrated to us that demand for cloud services is growing fast and user acceptance has matured.
Cloud offers significant operational and cost efficiencies to our business and our customers, changing IT from a capital cost model to an operational one. The cloud management software we use gives us the ability to deliver a higher quality of customer experience and service, shortens our sales cycle and makes our services more transparent and visible to the customer. Cloud also enables Servecentric to deliver IT services that match actual requirements not future capacity, increased business mobility, reduced carbon footprint and energy bills, faster service provisioning, enabling access to temporary resources and lower administration costs. This is a virtualised infrastructure as a service platform.
What platform is used?
The platform is built on a physical infrastructure of Dell and EMC with Juniper firewalls. Layered over this is VMware’s industry standard virtualisation software suite onto which we have deployed Fort Technologies’ cloud-management software.
What were the key business benefits of Servecentric’s approach?
Servecentric’s approach offers complete cost and service transparency to our partners, making it easier for them to design, price and sell IT solutions to their customers. Our approach reduces overall costs compared with traditional solutions and increases channel margin. Our pedigree in data centre and IT infrastructure services means we can offer a superior service-level agreement, greater operational resilience and increased data integrity than many other providers. Servecentric can also guarantee which legal jurisdiction a client’s data is hosted in, a feature we consider to be vital to Irish and European businesses.
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