How CloudSigma became the perfect cloud partner for Irish IT services provider Servecentric

Partner Profile

Servecentric is a privately owned Irish Data Centre and IT services provider based in Dublin. The company provides a range of colocation, connectivity, cloud and IT managed services for clients across the globe. The company is a registered ISP. It offers highly available connectivity and security solutions for its Data Centre and Cloud client base. Through its partnership with Cloudsigma, the company offers end-to-end private, public, and hybrid cloud deployments under one roof. Servecentric operates to the highest international standards, ensuring business-critical systems are available and protected, 24 x 7 x 365.

Building on over 15 years of experience providing premium quality Data Centre services including colocation, connectivity, and managed services, thanks to its partnership with CloudSigma, Servecentric is now offering a full self-service, pay-as-you-go Infrastructure-as-a-Service public cloud. Servecentric Enterprise Cloud offers unrivaled price/performance, ease of use, and support.

The Challenge

Traditionally, Servecentric has been operating as a Data Centre and a communications provider. For over 15 years the company has specialized in colocation, connectivity, and managed services. For Servecentric, the natural progression beyond providing these services was to deliver a Public Cloud platform from their own facility. In fact, the company has in-house solutions for this. However, for them working on a cloud platform and acquiring customers in parallel was not productive.

“We did have our own platform, but it was cumbersome because we were building, maintaining, and operating it ourselves and really what we needed was a partner that could do that piece for us.”

Therefore, the company decided to look for a partner. This way they could build upon their partner’s technology within their Data Centre, while delivering their services on top of the cloud solution.

“For us it’s very important to be able to provide very high-quality customer managed services. We needed a partner to provide a highly-performing cloud platform. This way our engineering teams could focus on the managed service aspects of our business.”

The right type of partnership model between Servecentric and the cloud partner was another difficulty the company was having. They needed a partner that would ensure its success corresponds with Servecentric’s business thriving as well.

“A number of cloud service providers at the MSP market or to the Data Centre market want to sell a product and charge a maintenance fee. And that’s not a partnership model in our view.”Brian Roe, Commercial Director @ Servecentric

Another issue for Servecentric was that they were getting a lot of feedback from their clients that hyperscale cloud offerings are becoming increasingly complex and difficult to cost-control. Therefore, the company wanted to offer a cloud service with a simple and transparent pricing model. 

In addition, Servecentric knew that as a business based in Ireland, it faces stiff competition from all the hyperscalers that are based in Dublin. For that reason, the company needed to collaborate with a cloud provider with unique value propositions. Only this kind of cloud partner could push them one step ahead in the highly competitive Irish cloud market. 

The Solution

Servecentric was determined to provide the best solution for the market and put an end to the challenges they had been facing. In 2018, CloudSigma and Servecentric formed a partnership launching the Servecentric Enterprise Cloud – a simple to use, high-performance, self-service cloud platform that gives clients full control over their cloud and eliminates restrictions on their deployments.

Currently, the Servecentric-CloudSigma partnership is growing at a steady pace. As a partner, CloudSigma brought a high-performance, flexible, and customizable cloud platform to Servecentric’s Dublin operations with no installation issues. The CloudSigma operations team has established procedures to guide them throughout the installation of the cloud stack and ongoing operations covered by monitoring services. In addition, a comprehensive testing framework for the platform prevents bugs from creeping into the production environment. This resulted in a very straightforward installation of the cloud.

“We did the hardware build inside the Data Centre. Then, CloudSigma worked in the background to install the hypervisor layer, the WebApp, the security, the routing, etc. So, it was a very clear process that went smoothly.”

Most importantly for Servecentric, having a partner that provides a fully managed public cloud node as part of a global cloud network-enabled their team of engineers to focus on their core colocation and managed hosting services.

“From the beginning we were very drawn to CloudSigma. Mainly because of the platform itself and the self-service part of it. The fact that CloudSigma was looking after all the management of the platform and the payment engine was a big win for us.”Brian Roe, Commercial Director @ Servecentric

Servecentric could rely on CloudSigma to operate the cloud, while providing 24/7 incident management and customer support. That’s why they were able to also focus on developing a client base that could take advantage of fully customised cloud and hybrid environments that suit any business requirements.

Servecentric was also attracted to CloudSigma’s innovative Cloud-as-a-Service (CaaS) solution that is founded on a collaboration and a revenue-share model between CloudSigma and the partner. They needed a true partner that has the motivation to grow together with them and CloudSigma was able to provide just that. 

“What’s best about the Cloud-as-a-Service model is that CloudSigma is completely invested in the success of its partners. Тhe fact that it’s a profit share model means that it’s only when we succeed that CloudSigma can succeed.”

“There are some very clear benefits of using CloudSigma to our clients. The service portal is very easy to use, but most importantly the costing model is very simple upfront. You find with some of the public cloud providers that it’s complex by design. You even don’t really know how much you’re going to be spending until you’re using it in production. And then the cost can scale up without you fully understanding why that happens. With CloudSigma the costs are very clear and understandable from the get-go.”Brian Roe, Commercial Director @ Servecentric

“The end-user feedback so far has all been very positive. CloudSigma brought to Servecentric a set of features that our previous solutions didn’t bring. Here in Dublin, we’re facing tough competition from the hyperscalers. CloudSigma gives us a number of USPs that these companies can’t deliver. For example, it’s a great thing to be able to say that we have 30-second customer support response time, 24/7.”

The support provided by CloudSigma is available for all clients, with an average response time of less than 30 seconds. The service supports almost all Operating Systems and facilitates easy migration to and from the platform as required. Furthermore,  the Servecentric Enterprise Cloud is powered by HPE’s high-performance computing “Apollo” family, resulting in an exceptional price/performance ratios, both from compute and storage perspectives.

In addition, Servecentric were able to solve their challenge of finding a cloud partner that provides a simple and easy to use pricing method.

The Impact

“There is no doubt that having a public cloud offering opened up new opportunities for our business. First, there have been actual business and revenue streams from companies that have found us through discovering CloudSigma first. On top of that, it’s very important that when we’re talking to potential co-location clients and connectivity clients, that we say that we have a full suite of platform products for them and that we can look after so we can provide an end-to-end solution. So it definitely opens opportunities around that.”Brian Roe, Commercial Director @ Servecentric

Thanks to the cloud-as-a-service partnership with CloudSigma, Servecentric is able to venture out to new markets as well. Traditionally, they would pick up clients at an early stage and in the co-location business that would grow with them. As currently most businesses are born in the cloud, it’s important for Servecentric to capture that kind of business. That’s because they wouldn’t get it as co-location anymore. So through CloudSigma, they can attract clients building their business in the cloud.

“CloudSigma provides a very mature and professional product offering that stands alongside what is a mature Data Centre and connectivity offering that we have.”

Furthermore, CloudSigma’s platform was very reliable for Servecentric’s end-users. All of Servecentric’s clients that migrated to the new offering found the performance very strong in relation to alternatives on the market. Customers also found that they get more bang for their buck. That’s because they don’t need to apply as much resources because the performance of the compute and the storage is so high.

“We have a number of clients that are our colocation clients also that have cross-connect with zero latency into our cloud platform. And that’s a huge benefit for us and for the clients. The support service has met that short-service window and that’s really important. The other thing is the partnership model means that we own the service, so it’s privately Irish- owned. And just in terms of data sovereignty that has an impact for a number of clients.”Brian Roe, Commercial Director @ Servecentric

“I would recommend CloudSigma as a partner for two main reasons. The first reason is that the product is very reliable and very high on performance. And the second thing is that the business model means that CloudSigma is completely invested in the success of its partners.”

Overall, so far Servcentric found that having high-performance storage, even for small storage volumes is a huge advantage. With other public cloud providers oftentimes if you want to get IOPS (input/output operations per second) you have to push into higher volumes that you don’t actually require.

“Stability has been excellent. There’s been, I think, one glitch of about 20 minutes in two years. So, the performance has been excellent.”

Since the launch of the Servecentric Enterprise Cloud, the company’s customers have experienced real cost-savings and a performance increase. A lot of their colocation clients who were on-premise in Servecentric’s Data Centre were also able to easily cross-connect to the cloud.

The Future

“Ultimately, we want to have our cloud business on an equal footing with our co-location business. And ultimately what we’d like to do is build further nodes either in Ireland or the UK, so that we can have multiple sites.”Brian Roe, Commercial Director @ Servecentric

Servecentric is confident that their partnership with CloudSigma will boost the business results for their customers even further. They are looking into the future with a growth-focused strategy for both the colocation and the cloud part of their business. However, their focus is on growing their cloud business as a priority.

“Our plan for the future is to continue our alignments with CloudSigma. Even though we have a certain amount of business with hyperscale public clouds, it’s a CloudSigma first strategy that we have.”

Initially the cloud platform division was growing at a slower pace. Howver, Servecentric have adopted a cloud-first strategy in order to drive growth in all sectors of the business.

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About Zhenya Mocheva

Zhenya is a Digital Marketing Expert at CloudSigma, focusing on brand strategy, social media marketing and digital marketing campaigns. She is passionate about the continuous innovation within the digital environment and the endless growth opportunities that inbound marketing brings.

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