Partner Profile
IPC® (IP Converge Data Services, Inc.) is a Philippine-based Cloud Service Provider, Internet Data Center operator, and telecommunications company. Its main focus is boosting local and regional enterprises with managed data services and business solutions at international standards. IPC’s data center facilities are state-of-the-art and telco-grade, built to support various enterprise IT and telecommunications requirements 24×7. The company helps businesses by providing high quality solutions that minimize the clients’ efforts in IT resources and management.
As a pioneering data center and service provider, IPC felt that it was only natural to explore offering its locally hosted Infrastructure-as-as-Service (IaaS). The company went through many challenges and worked with several partners before meeting with CloudSigma. The dedication and expertise shown by the CloudSigma team helped IPC strengthen their position as a premier cloud service provider in the region.
The Challenge
Established in 2005, IPC quickly became one of the cloud service pioneers in the Asia Pacific region. The company entered into partnerships with industry giants Salesforce and subsequently Google. In 2012 IPC was the first company to offer IaaS cloud services in the Philippines. They worked with different partners, however, different technical and commercial issues prevented their success. Until, as if by fate, IPC and CloudSigma crossed paths to form the team that still prospers today.
“There is no other cloud in the Philippines such as the CloudSigma cloud. There are other local clouds but in terms of capability, there is nothing close to the CloudSigma platform.”Niño Valmonte, Director Marketing & Digital Innovation @ IPC
Initially, IPC worked with a US-based company offering IaaS. This marked their first attempt to offer cloud infrastructure. Sadly, the business model did not align well with the go-to-market strategies needed to obtain success. Although the system was efficient, commercial challenges remained and thus forced IPC to look for an alternative.
“We tried hard to build a cloud platform on our own. Firstly, we started working with a US-based company but it did not really work out. We went through a few vendor partners.”
Next, IPC decided to take on a different strategy and build their own cloud stack. Using the help of a Korean technology provider that offered a solution to the drawbacks of the previous setup. Unfortunately, the solution met its own challenges in terms of systems maturity and infrastructure stability. Hence, this scenario did not work out either.
At the time, there was still no high quality IaaS offering based in the Philippines. Because of this, IPC was determined to take advantage of the available opportunity.
The need for an easy-to-deploy, high-performance and secure cloud platform was very much felt in the market. With its desire to corner this local IaaS market, IPC explored and worked with various cloud technology providers over time. One of them was based in Openstack, and in the process had to support IaaS customers on multiple platforms. Unfortunately, this did not deliver what IPC envisioned. This proved to be not only an ineffective business model but inefficient operationally as well. The company needed to resolve this dilemma once and for all.
The Solution
For several years, IPC worked with several technology vendors and partners providing cloud services with very little success. They were determined to provide the best solution for the market and put an end to the challenges they had been facing. In early 2016, CloudSigma and IPC started negotiations and eventually formed a partnership.
“I would say that the CloudSigma platform is by far the most stable and easiest to use. More importantly, the people at CloudSigma are extremely easy to work with. I believe this is the most critical advantage for us.”Niño Valmonte, Director Marketing & Digital Innovation @ IPC
“It was a learning experience for us which led us to seek out a partner such as CloudSigma. A partner that offers a fully managed IaaS solution, and we are very happy that we ended up working together.”
Today the IPC- CloudSigma relationship is stronger than ever. The CloudSigma operations team has established procedures to help IPC with the installation of cloud stack. They also provide guides and tutorials for ongoing operations covered by monitoring services. In addition, an in-depth testing framework for the platform prevents bugs from creeping into the production environment. This resulted in a very straightforward installation of the cloud. It took CloudSigma just a few weeks to deploy and test the cloud once the hardware was delivered onsite. The process was clear to both the IPC and CloudSigma operations teams, each performing according to their expectations. There were no delays or any unexpected issues.
“Everything went smoothly. You did it very fast and easily. There is nothing negative which stands out that I can recall. Despite the fact that you were working remotely, there were no problems.”
The partnership between IPC and CloudSigma based on the cloud-as-a-service model has lived up to expectations for IPC. They had finally found cloud partner in Asia who offered them exactly what they wanted. IPC did not have to operate the cloud by themselves because CloudSigma was taking care of all this. CloudSigma was committed to provide its consulting expertise, as well as 24/7 incident management and support. IPC could take advantage of this and develop the business pipeline around the newly deployed solution. Also, due to CloudSigmas’ revenue share model, they had incentive to deliver excellent services and grow sales with IPC.
The Impact
Whenever CloudSigma deploys a new cloud-as-a-service location, we implement a strategy that includes onsite training for sales and marketing. We also provide a work plan for the additional details. The on-boarding of the IPC team and familiarization with the CloudSigma capabilities proved successful. Since IPC was already in the IaaS business, it was easy for them to understand the CloudSigma solution and approach. The CloudSigma team trained IPC’s technical and sales teams to ensure that they were prepared to handle different scenarios. This includes being familiar with the webapp, the various management procedures, and the way the cloud was operated.
“CloudSigma came over and trained the technical, sales and support teams. There were no hitches, all the documentation was there; all the marketing sheets and data sheets were available. It was very smooth, very fast and very easy.”
IPC and Cloudsigma participated together at various events which contributed to the successful partnership as it is today. CloudSigma CEO Robert Jenkin personally helped support a number of events. His input played a great role, as attendees of the said events valued hearing from an experienced cloud executive. IPC’s clients benefited from discussion on best practices and were able to share their experiences and needs.
“Robert’s participation in our marketing activities is a big deal for IPC and still continues to help create market demand and generate online sign-ups and revenue.”
When it comes to cloud management and technical support, IPC is more than satisfied with CloudSigma’s efforts. Despite the distance, they find the cooperation between IPC’s pre-sales and Cloudsigma’s customer support teams very productive and effective.
“We are happy that the CloudSigma’s operations and support teams are available 24/7. This matters to us because we’re in a different timezone and we like to work with a “round-the-clock” team. There have not been any challenges so far.”Niño Valmonte, Director Marketing & Digital Innovation @ IPC
The cloud in Manila is running smoothly without a single unplanned maintenance. The platform is stable and the performance of the service is much greater than any previous technologies IPC used.
“There is no downtime as of yet. There have not been any major complaints and the users are more than satisfied. We recently reached a point where we needed to further expand the initial cloud infrastructure and continue to scale up.”
Having CloudSigma hosted locally is one of the biggest advantages recognized by the customers. Although there are other local cloud platforms, the capabilities of the CloudSigma platform are unique.
“One of main benefits for end users is that the cloud is hosted locally in the Philippines. There are other local clouds here but in terms of capability, there is nothing comparable to what the CloudSigma platform is able to provide.”
Moreover, IPC’s clients are impressed by the uptime guarantee and service level agreement (SLA). CloudSigma guarantees 99.99% uptime which is higher than the SLA of any competitor in the region.
Another value proposition which the users in the Philippines point out are the unbundled resources. They highly appreciate the freedom and flexibility which this feature is gives them. Niño explains that compared to the other available services, users welcomed the simple utility-based billing as a long-awaited change.
In addition to that comes the ability to provision virtual machines in seconds and the fast performance. The simple user interface is combined with the amazing speed of the CPU and SSD, which are underlying components of the platform.
“The painless way of interacting with the cloud is always impressive when we do a demo of the Cloudsigma platform. CloudSigma is faster than any other locally provided cloud infrastructure.”
Last but not least, a huge advantage is the ability to enable Disaster-recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS). IPC considers this a big addition to the value of CloudSigma services. Even before the official launch of the DRaaS solution, many users expressed their interest to test it.
The flexibility and high performance of the cloud are some of the most valued features for users in the Philippines. Still, IPC is excited to see what CloudSigma will offer next. They know that this will open new market channels for them, increase revenue from existing clients and attract more clients.
The Future
IPC is confident that their partnership with CloudSigma will boost the business results for their clients even further. IPC has been seeing steady month on month growth of revenue levels from the CloudSigma cloud solution.
“IaaS is definitely a significant revenue contributor. The CloudSigma cloud has become an integral part of our service portfolio. We feel that through this partnership, we are able to position ourselves as a premier cloud provider in the Philippines. This has given us a sense of pride and satisfaction with our current growth. Without CloudSigma, we would be missing a major component of our cloud strategy.”Niño Valmonte, Director Marketing & Digital Innovation @ IPC
IPC’s experience in the cloud infrastructure business has shown that this service brings a lot of chances for growth. In addition to that, IPC appreciates the particular positioning advantages which the alliance with CloudSigma has brought.
“With IaaS, the business opportunities are literally countless. There are so many ways to take advantage of virtual infrastructure like this. The value added service we both provide are a source of new opportunities and ways to use the cloud platform. This is good timing for us to be active and grow our partnership with CloudSigma. We’re all very excited about our mutual future.”
To the question whether IPC would recommend CloudSigma to other data center providers, Niño answers honestly:
“That is a tough question. As a matter of fact, we want to be the only CloudSigma partner in the Philippines! If we are talking about someone from outside the Philippines then we would highly recommend CloudSigma.”
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