MANAGED SERVICES cloud
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ounded in 2002, Vnetrix is the brainchild of two experienced IT professionals, with over 35 years’ experience in leading international companies, the company has enjoyed year on year growth by building a loyal base of clients that have remained with Vnetrix due to the dedication, skill and care practiced by its staff. Key foundations to the business include a belief in modular style service delivery, and a true commitment to developing long lasting relationships with clients.
Vnetrix supports small, medium and large businesses providing a wide range of IT support services tailored to individual client needs whether the requirement is basic user support; desktop and server management to managed hosting services. They focus on providing premium customer service to all of their clients and ensuring all solutions are rigorously reviewed against their client’s requirements. Operating from six data centres worldwide (UK, US and Europe), Vnetrix is able to build flexible customised infrastructures based on client needs. Hosting options include shared, dedicated servers and cloud hosting solutions.
Rob Norman, chief executive officer (CEO), Vnetrix explains: “We have always been an MSP since the beginning, initially starting with remote managed services, user support etc. Then late in 2003 we launched a hosting service to further expand our portfolio. The rapid rollout of DSL lines enabled us to offer remote management cost effectively to clients allowing us to take on new contracts. Our hosting solutions grew to include more and more complex customised dedicated hosting and in particular for the new media industry. AppLogic has provided a whole new stream of opportunity with existing and new clients and provides us with the capability to compete in new markets.”
This fast-growing MSP has leveraged the CA Technologies AppLogic turnkey cloud computing platform to drive Business Service Innovation by reducing time-to-market for new business services, while simultaneously increasing margin.
Business Service Innovation is how CA Technologies helps enterprises move from simply managing and maintaining IT to delivering business services to ensure speed, agility, innovation with cost/risk efficiencies. It optimizes technology planning in the context of particular business goals, through value roadmaps and the unique solutions that underpin that roadmap. This framework has resulted in a common platform that endows IT with unprecedented speed, innovation, cost/risk efficiencies and performance.
The roadmaps integrate the following services, tools, and solutions to drive game-changing outcomes: £ Model: The design and deployment of customers’ composite services are optimized through modelling and simulation of performance, integrations, security, capacity requirements and cost—before any investment is made.
£ Assemble: Service resources from mainframe, distributed and virtualized environments—as well as third-party and cloud services—are assembled into service bundles.
£ Automate: Rapidly developed, customized solutions are automated to orchestrate services across physical, virtual and cloud environments.
£ Assure: Monitoring, predictive analytics and performance optimization are applied across the entire IT value chain, assuring service levels and reliability.
£ All of the elements of the value roadmap are managed under a
single Service Management framework, regardless of where the services are located. CA Technologies is a leader in the Service Management category and has extended that leadership to cloud and hybrid environments.
Challenges
Prior to deploying the CA Technologies’ solution, Vnetrix was facing a number of challenges to ensure that the company remained competitive in a rapidly changing IT and managed services landscape. As Rob Norman explains: “The growing expense of our day to day data centre running costs, the increasingly apparent inefficiencies of dedicated servers, increased competition, the need to deliver scale at speed, a growing acceptance of the Cloud model amongst our customer base and, not least, the state of the economy were all factors that gave us little choice but to look at developing our IT infrastructure.
He continues: “Prior to engaging with CA our hosting was 99% dedicated servers with some shared services. We needed cloud capabilities in order to compete with other IT offerings and for us to help our clients evolve their infrastructure needs. The costs and inflexibilities of dedicated services meant we had to react and build our own cloud platforms. We are now able to discuss and deliver a whole range of flexible hosting solutions for clients.”
Talking about the decision to invest in the CA solution, Norman explains: “We evaluated a number of possible solutions before deciding on AppLogic. Specifically, we looked at two other products in detail, one a main stream virtual server platform that is well known, the other an open source cloud platform. For the virtual platform we didn’t want to just be considered another provider, we wanted something new and exciting, secondly we wanted our cloud platform backed by a commercial organisation that could give us guaranteed support hence we opted not to go down the open source route. “The decision was made easy for us as the CA Technologies’ offering allowed us to re-use our existing IT investment, is x86 hardware vendor agnostic, and provides us with the speed and flexibility to deliver competitive managed services, along with the ability to scale our grid infrastructure. Additionally, the licensing model is very cost- effective for us.”
Norman continues: “We evaluated the AppLogic platform ourselves during a rigorous proof of concept phase. We built a test lab and took complex example setups to prove it would work for us. It delivered against all the criteria and we immediately started discussing the platform with clients.”
Vnetrix is differentiating itself by rolling out cloud infrastructure in a few hours to support its Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as- a-Service (PaaS) offerings. “The CA AppLogic platform gives Vnetrix a clear competitive edge in an increasingly crowded market,” says Rob Norman. “We chose the cloud platform based on its fast deployment capabilities, support for both our Windows and Linux environments, and the vendor neutrality of CA Technologies. Using the CA AppLogic platform we can rapidly build new cloud applications for our clients, without involving an army of people.”
Vnetrix customers are already reaping the benefits of operating on the CA AppLogic platform. The platform helps Universal Music to support the high volume, public-facing artist sites for Universal Music Japan and internal applications, including running a critical part of its
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