VERITRA FOCALPOINT Helping Businesses Focus on their Business January 2012 Veritra News Veritra opens 100-seat development center in Hyderabad, India Page 1 New Partnerships Veritra announces two new partnerships with VMware and EMC Page 2 Agile Infrastructure Companies draw strong links between their IT agility and agility as a company Page 3 Veritra opens development center in Hyderabad, India Veritra announces completion of a 100-seat development and Remote Infrastructure Management (RIM) center in Hyderabad, India Headquartered in Schaumburg, Illinois, Veritra announces the opening of a 100-seat development and RIM center in Hyderabad, India. The center is located in the heart of Hyderabad and is attracting interest from top local talent in the area of mobile and Platform-as-a-Service application development. So how does a small software development company attract top talent away from Dell, Microsoft, and other large companies in Hyderabad? According to Rao Achanta, VP of Software Development for Veritra, While it is true that more junior developers gravitate to the larger firms in order to build their resume, experienced developers are often looking for a better work environment and engaging projects. That is where Veritra has the advantage. According to Rao, senior developers are excited about working on Veritra projects in the areas of social networking and mobile applications. They also like the fact that we utilize Agile methodologies and foster an engaging and supportive work environment. Veritra hopes to have the center staffed to 50% capacity by Q1, 2012, to support current projects with room to expand when needed. It s about the people! How do you create a work environment that fosters employee engagement, autonomy, and productivity while holding people accountable for the results? Implement a ROWE a Results Only Work Environment! Veritra teammates are in control of where they work, how they work, and when they work. They are evaluated on results instead of presence - which increases the organization s performance while moral and productivity soars! More on Veritra s work environment coming in future newsletters.
Veritra announces key partnerships with VMware and EMC Are you still talking about virtualizing your systems or deploying cloud solutions? It is time to move your message and strategy up a level in the value chain! Veritra is proud to announce that we have achieved Professional Solutions Provider status with VMware. This program certifies that Veritra has the expertise to sell and implement VMware solutions across the product set. Ask us how we can help you to create and manage your private and hybrid cloud solutions. Even though there are efficiencies and cost reductions associated with virtualizing your infrastructure, the value comes from presenting a service catalog of offerings for your business users to choose from. Veritra can help you transform your IT landscape into something that adds value to your business. Talk to your business leaders about virtualization and you will probably put them to sleep. Talk to them about a catalog of IT services that can increase their business agility, and you might just get their applause! Veritra is an authorized reseller of the VNX and VNXe line of EMC network storage. High-performing unified storage with unsurpassed simplicity and efficiency, optimized for virtual applications. VNX is the perfect storage solution for VMware implementations. 2
An Agile Infrastructure is King By: Mike Weaver, VP Cloud & Service Delivery, Veritra According to a 2011 Gartner CIO survey, developing a flexible infrastructure is the top-priority, ranking higher than reducing costs. CIOs have been waging a battle to be able to respond to business needs for some time because business is changing at a faster rate than what is possible with legacy datacenter and infrastructure investments. It is no longer acceptable to tell the CEO that a high valued project needs millions of dollars in infrastructure investment, or months of project time to complete an upgrade to the supporting infrastructure. There are just too many competitors who have the luxury of being nimble. While flexibility is important, agility is really what businesses need today. Agility is the ability of a business to adapt rapidly to changes in the business environment. Simply trying to reduce costs is not good enough anymore when your competition is growing revenue by achieving agility. When CIOs are faced with real challenges that come from a long-term underinvestment in infrastructure, a lack of planning, or from business changing faster than the A case for hosted Exchange support structure, they need to regroup in order to figure out how to be agile. Fortunately, there are options available in order to build an agile infrastructure. Achieving Agility Whenever you discuss business agility in terms of IT today, it inevitably leads to a discussion of the benefits of Cloud computing. The reasons Cloud computing is associated with an agile infrastructure are: Elasticity Scalability Pay-for-what-you-use model Instant-On satisfies needs of business users In a recent survey conducted by AbsoluteData, companies drew strong links between their IT agility and their agility as a company. So how are IT Organizations utilizing Cloud to increase Agility? There are many Continued Agility is the ability of a business to adapt rapidly to changes in the business environment Business Agility - Over 160 million seats worldwide, Over 150 Hosted Exchange Providers - Large companies with over 100,000 users have migrated to Hosted Exchange - Immediately reduces the burden on IT - Potential to lower costs and make them more predicable - Upgrades are done by the hosting provider - Access to robust business continuity and backup - Rapid deployment and scaling - Robust security - Reduce viruses and spam coming into the network - Access to Exchange Expertise - Move costs from CapEx to OpEx We can help you begin your journey to the cloud by moving to hosted Exchange! 3
paths to the Cloud and most companies are taking several at once. Software-as-a-Service offerings are now common in most enterprises in areas such as expense reimbursement, payroll, HR, and other business applications. When these systems are migrated to the cloud, it immediately reduces the burden on IT in regards to datacenter and management resources. These are very specialized applications that require specialized in-house resources to manage. The next step for many companies is taking a good look at their collaboration and messaging applications. These are business critical services that are easily migrated and managed by service providers such as Microsoft, Intermedia, and Google. Once again, there is an immediate relief on valuable IT resources and an immediate advantage for the business to be able to scale on demand - which leads to business agility. Think about what a large business acquisition could do to a near capacity Exchange system and how a hosted Exchange provider who can scale on demand could manage that challenge. Also consider how an intimidating and expensive Exchange upgrade can lead to companies being several versions out of date, which leads to further dissatisfaction from business users. The Private Cloud Enterprise datacenters today are a complex mix of legacy applications, business critical apps, ecommerce, and a plethora of disparate systems. It isn t practical for any but the smallest of organizations to operate 100% in the public cloud. Existing investments in infrastructure are just too great to be transitioned to the public cloud overnight. The way to achieve agility in terms of the rest of the datacenter is to look at how we approach IT Infrastructure. There is a real need to maintain control over security, compliance, and operations that will force companies to maintain their own datacenter for some time into the future. But the efficiencies gained in the public cloud can be achieved in a private/hybrid cloud approach in the corporate datacenter. Characteristics such as selfservice provisioning, elasticity, and instant on access to infrastructure do not have to be sacrificed for on premise private cloud solutions. The primary drawback to private cloud has been the complexity to deploy and manage it, as well as the inefficiency of having to size it for peak workloads. Sizing for peak workloads results in lower utilization of the underlying server capacity. A hybrid cloud can overcome the drawback of inefficient server utilization. In a hybrid cloud solution, peak workloads are moved into the public cloud so that the private clouds do not have to be oversized to handle the spikes. There are a couple approaches to a hybrid cloud and the best choice depends on the business need. If the cloud need is for a single application, such as a web site, it is fairly easy to bring up more resources in a public cloud infrastructure such as what Rackspace or Amazon Web Services provides. Once the workloads start to get more complex, this approach to hybrid clouds quickly begins to unravel. VMware has taken a holistic approach of blending and moving computing resources between private and public cloud scenarios in a very transparent manner. The advantage of this approach is that customers receive the benefit of utilizing a common platform, common management, and common security framework across both the private and public cloud systems. VMware administrators, or automated schedulers, can move applications from the private cloud, to the public cloud, and back to the private cloud, without interruption to the application. These services are provided under the VMware vcloud umbrella of services and can be automated with vcloud Director. Datacenter automation is a key component of managing IT computing power as a utility. So what does this have to do with business agility? Consider a few of the following scenarios: Continued Developing a flexible infrastructure is the top-priority, ranking higher than reducing costs - 2011 Gartner CIO Survey 4
Veritra & Intermedia If you are considering an Exchange upgrade in 2012, you should stop and consider the cloud solutions that are available to you. At Veritra, we can t think of any compelling reason for most organizations not to move to the cloud for messaging and collaboration services. Microsoft does a good job of marketing Office 365, but there are a lot of hosted Exchange options. Veritra has partnered with Intermedia to provide cloud services to our customers because Intermedia offers a premium service with the best SLAs and support in the industry. Intermedia is currently the World s largest hosted Exchange provider at over 400,000 seats Here are some differentiators: 99.999 financially backed SLAs 24 x 7 email and phone support Free migration services 8 secure SAS70 datacenters Once every year a company sponsors a football bowl game that will be televised and they want to advertise contests where people have to register at their corporate web site. The registration process is a business revenue generator since it identifies potential new customers for its products. The load will easily overwhelm servers that are appropriately sized for normal conditions. Sharing loads across a hybrid cloud scenario is a great solution for this situation. Quarterly business reports are running slower and slower due to increased loads on reporting servers. If you invest in more servers they will sit idle except for 4 days out of the year. A better solution may be to utilize cloud servers where you only have to pay for the 4 days per year that they are active at a much lower cost than traditional infrastructure. A company wants to deactivate a large division that is losing money in order to regain profitability. Because the investment has already been made in office productivity hardware and licensing, it is lost and must be written off. If the division was supported by a SaaS, pay for what you use model, such as hosted Exchange, SharePoint, etc., that operational expense could have been eliminated and returned to the operating budget. The business and IT worlds are moving too fast for slow, cumbersome companies and they will face serious challenges moving into the future unless they figure out how to become agile. Technology has taken away the advantage that large companies used to have over small nimble companies. Smaller companies can have an effective web presence, utilize social media, and be first movers into a market based on their ability to act and respond to changing business climates. When business users got frustrated with getting on the radar of the internal IT department, they went to the cloud for software solutions. Now CIOs are beginning to operate IT as a business, understanding where all the costs are going, and doing either charge-back or show-back to the business so that they can take responsibility for the costs. At the end of the day, businesses need to be agile in order to remain competitive, and IT agility is closely linked to a company s agility. Utilizing public, private, and hybrid cloud solutions is a key part of attaining an agile, flexible, and nimble infrastructure that can quickly respond to business needs. It is always a better situation to be in when you can just say yes to the business when they ask, if IT can do that. Account and PC backup services See the full comparison with Office 365 and Google Apps here: http://www.intermedia.net/office- 365.aspx Veritra can help you make sense of the cloud and begin the journey! 5
Veritra is a Total IT Solutions Provider that specializes in solving technology challenges for our clients so that they can focus on their core business and not the technology that enables it. Our services include IT Consulting, Infrastructure Services, Outsourcing, IT Assessments, Cloud Solutions & Roadmap Planning, Software Development, and Mobile App development. Helping Businesses Focus on their Business www.veritra.com Contact Information Veritra Inc. 1701 E. Woodfield Road, Suite 210 Schaumburg, IL 60173 877.577.0077