Dutch Cloud Provides Differentiated Services to Customers through its IBM Partnership

Transcription

1 Dutch Cloud Provides Differentiated Services to Customers through its IBM Partnership Judith Hurwitz President and CEO Vikki Kolbe Principal Technology Strategist Tricia Gilligan Principal Consultant Sponsored by IBM

2 Introduction The role and definition of the Managed Service Provider (MSP) is changing dramatically. Over the last 5 years, the MSP market has experienced steady growth with a compelling forecast. In the past, MSPs provided a set of standard, well honed IT services at a competitive price by leveraging their buying power and resource pool. The MSP was viewed as delivering an outsourced solution that decreased the customer s IT spend and enabled the customer to focus on executing their business strategy. MSPs were experts at managing hardware, a specific application or hosting an off the shelf solution with very little customization or integration. Traditionally, the customer sacrificed visibility, control of the IT operation, interoperability and flexibility of technical features to manage dynamic workloads for an attractive price point. Changes in customer expectations and new market drivers have created demand for customer centric solution based MSPs. Changes in customer expectations and new market drivers have created demand for customer centric solution based MSPs. The adoption of cloud based platforms; the need to support Big Data, the use of social and mobile have reshaped the MSP landscape and MSP solution characteristics. The most effective cloud platforms are secure and compliant with regulations such as Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), Payment Card Industry security standards (PCI) and Sarbanes Oxley (SOX) enabling MSPs to deliver vertically focused solutions for healthcare, financial services, retail and the government sector. Successful MSPs are becoming a strategic partner in helping to improve operations as they provide customers with access to best in class technology and technology experts while only paying for what they use. The convergence of these factors has enabled MSPs to innovate with their customers creating greater alignment between IT and the business. By focusing on the customer, the successful MSP is a strategic partner who delivers services to achieve the business vision and outcomes. To achieve success, the MSP must design architecture with core infrastructure capabilities that are reliable enough to meet availability service level agreements, yet flexible enough to deliver near-instant deployment of 100s of virtual machines in seconds instead of minutes or hours. This paper will focus on Dutch Cloud, a successful market leader that has tripled revenue in three years by focusing on differentiated services and customer satisfaction. Dutch Cloud s focus on customer outcomes Dutch Cloud, formed in 2009 and based in the Netherlands, is a leading Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) provider. The company s CEO, Martijn Van Zoeren, an experienced technology executive, discovered that small and medium sized businesses were unhappy with how the software they needed was being delivered to them. Customers found that implementations were too slow and cumbersome and did not address their need for rapid change. Van Zoeren understood that, customers want Page 2

3 their partners to understand how your services will impact their business. They don t want you to just implement a machine. He was able to be successful in serving his customers by providing them with infrastructure services that were well integrated and managed. One of the first things that Van Zoeren did when he started Dutch Cloud was to offer infrastructure cloud-based services to customers. Dutch Cloud evolved to deliver services to corporate clients in Europe with an expansion into the managed service market. Being customer centric, having a team with extensive experience with Cloud platforms and being 100% committed to IBM, enabled Dutch Cloud to implement architecture to meet customers long term requirements. It is not only about delivering machines; it is about architecting and managing a solution to support our customers business outcomes, says Van Zoeren. Dutch Cloud Architectural Approach Dutch Cloud s three data centers and robust network were designed and built with the overarching guiding principle that the infrastructure had to be audit ready without sacrificing time to deployment. Dutch Cloud s three data centers and robust network were designed and built with the overarching guiding principle that the infrastructure had to be audit ready without sacrificing time to deployment. Key to achieving the vision was to define a set of requirements and implement a technology stack that could solve the most critical customer challenges. Customer Challenges While customers have a variety of challenges depending on the nature of their business and changes in their industries, there are some overriding challenges that most companies experience. These include: Customers want to respond quickly to business events, and need to provision new server resources in a few minutes. Business partners and customers are no longer willing to pay for idle capacity or buy capacity in anticipation of a temporary peak load, but they do want to scale as needed in real time. Customers want disaster recovery capability with extreme Recovery Point and Recovery Time objectives for mission critical applications such as financial systems. These customers are often faced with the financial burden of purchasing dedicated hardware to replicate the environment on warm/ cold stand by. Dutch Cloud Requirements Van Zoerens vision was for Dutch Cloud to be seen by its customers as a specialist in delivering Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) by providing highly secure clouds to customers with optimized security. To meet his vision, Van Zoeren defined strategic requirements, which his team used to evaluate Page 3

4 potential technology partners to build the Dutch Cloud IaaS solution. These requirements included: 1. Rapid service delivery with high degrees of automation. 2. Customer isolation for multi-tenancy. 3. Customer and management traffic separation. 4. Integration with the existing IBM V7000 storwize for non-local storage. 5. Easily extensible platform, supporting simple customization. 6. Highly scalable and able to recovery autonomously from failures without interruptions to the service (no outages). 7. Ability to brand the portal/gui for specific customers. 8. Ability to support a reseller model, and segregate resources. Benefits of the architected approach Dutch Cloud determined that they could be successful if they focused their offerings on pragmatic incremental steps for their customers. These offerings approached many different aspects of their customers businesses including flexibility and automation and transparency and control. Dutch Cloud determined that they could be successful if they focused their offerings on pragmatic incremental steps for their customers. These offerings approached many different aspects of their customers businesses including flexibility and automation and transparency and control. Reaction time and favorable pricing To support customer requirements for Disaster Recovery options Dutch Cloud used IBM Cloud provisioning that allows them to provision up to 200 servers in less than five minutes. In the past, the company had to reserve the entire physical server for a customer. This ability for fast provisioning means that the company can provide new services faster for less cost. Transparency and Control Customers want full control on the way the cloud service implementation will be designed and delivered. To accommodate this requirement, Dutch Cloud is able to provide a customized portal for each customer using the IBM Cloud solution. In this way, Dutch Cloud was able to use the customer s own branding so that users would view their services as an extension of the company s IT infrastructure rather than a third party offering. This provides customers with control over how they use the cloud services. Page 4

5 Standardization, Automation and Flexibility Customers often need to run standard applications such as or financial systems but need to have the flexibility to add critical services such as security or specialized configurations that traditional MSPs cannot support. In addition, customers require the flexibility of different deployment models. Some companies require that an application is deployed on isolated physical servers while other companies want to add new capacity on demand from the cloud. Many MSPs cannot accomodate these nuances as the cost of the service would be too high. By combining IBM SoftLayer s cloud offerings, Dutch Cloud is able to dynamically change or add deployment models at time of customer need. Driving Efficiencies When businesses are growing quickly they need to be able to expand and scale their computing services without disruption. Dutch Cloud has been able to gain new customers and satisfy existing customers by using IBM Smart Cloud Provisioning. Dutch Cloud is able to perform near-instant deployment of 100s of virtual machines in seconds instead of minutes or hours, rapid-deployment of an environment with near-zero downtime and automated recovery across heterogeneous platforms. Dutch Cloud is able to perform near-instant deployment of 100s of virtual machines in seconds instead of minutes or hours, rapid-deployment of an environment with near-zero downtime and automated recovery across heterogeneous platforms. Storage as a strategic offering Dutch Cloud has created a storage offering that provides reliability and ease of management. The storage service, based on IBM s Storage systems 7000 includes storage security as part of the foundation. To enhance storage security, data only resides on the SAN. This service helped differentiate Dutch Cloud because its customers were able to add additional storage services with a high level of security on demand. Flexibility as the key to business agility Dutch Cloud is able to easily support changing customer needs because its architecture is easily managed through standardized configurations available from the SmartCloud Provisioning service. This level of automation has provided huge dividends for Dutch Cloud. As the company grew and required a better equipped new data center, it was able to move to a new data center facility in only six hours compared to weeks without this level of automation. Because the intelligence was built into the networking, all traffic could be rerouted in only less than two hours. This speed was possible because the architecture was designed without requiring Dutch Cloud to specify a specific network location. Location details could be configured at deployment time. Page 5

6 Dutch Cloud Guiding Principles Dutch Cloud s founder, Van Zoeren has come up with his top six practices that he believes have made his company successful. 1. Be a trusted advisor to your client and have a strategic understanding of their business 2. Design flexibility, agility, and modularity into the architecture so that you can quickly support customer outcomes. Each aspect from storage to servers and networks are distinct entities without dependencies. 3. You have to be able to demonstrate that there is a true return on investment from the use of MSP services. Everything has to be measured and managed so that the most important customer needs are met. 4. Your network has to be sophisticated and flexible. If your network services are inflexible you will not be able to support changing customer needs. 5. Many industries have very stringent audit requirements. Therefore, your infrastructure has to be designed to support the audit needs across different markets. 6. Offer customers the choice between a physical and a virtualized environment. However, it is the responsibility of the MSP to recommend the right approach based on technical requirements, performance, the software being supported, and security. Dutch Cloud partnered with IBM because IBM could deliver both standardization in the environment and the flexibility to incorporate additional technical features required to meet individual customer workloads. The IBM Solution Dutch Cloud partnered with IBM because IBM could deliver both standardization in the environment and the flexibility to incorporate additional technical features required to meet individual customer workloads. Dutch Cloud also needed to make sure that the infrastructure was solid and worked, every time. Consistency in delivery was a must. In addition to using SmartCloud provisioning services, IBM security offerings, and storage, Dutch Cloud also found that it was cost effective to standardize on IBM hardware including the Power Systems, which guarantee an 85% utilization of the system. In order to create differentiated services for customers, Dutch Cloud partnered with IBM s Global Services organizations to create a joint set of solutions. In addition, Dutch Cloud has standardized on the following IBM offerings: IBM x3650 M3/M4 with six core cpu s, NO internal disks IBM Power platform (AIX) IBM p-720/p-740 with twelve core cpu s NO internal storage IBM SW7000 Page 6

7 Dutch Cloud Positioned For the Future Dutch Cloud is successful because it has combined a sophisticated architecture with a philosophy that supports customers need for flexibility. The company s concentration on business planning and process management skills mean that it is well positioned to capitalize on new opportunities across industries. Most of these new opportunities require a sophisticated level of security either because of specific geographic requirements or the need to innovate based on integrated business processes. Customers want the ability to be able to seamlessly scale their infrastructure without having to compromise. The ability for Dutch Cloud to provide transparency, control and flexibility is key to the company s future success. The modularity and configurability built into Dutch Cloud s infrastructure is the foundation to support its future goals. Dutch Cloud is successful because it has combined a sophisticated architecture with a philosophy that supports customers need for flexibility. Page 7

8 About Hurwitz & Associates Hurwitz & Associates is a strategy consulting, market research and analyst firm that focuses on how technology solutions solve real world customer problems. Hurwitz research concentrates on disruptive technologies, such as Big Data and Analytics, Security, Cloud Computing, Service Management, Information Management, Application Development and Deployment, and Collaborative Computing. Their experienced team merges deep technical and business expertise to deliver the actionable, strategic advice clients demand. Additional information on Hurwitz & Associates can be found at Copyright 2014, Hurwitz & Associates All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the copyright holder. Hurwitz & Associates is the sole copyright owner of this publication. All trademarks herein are the property of their respective owners. 35 Highland Circle Needham, MA Tel: