Founded in the UK, Fusion is a Service Management and IT Operations specialist that provides services that include consultancy, benefits realisation, data centre optimisation, and green IT audits to help companies achieve maximum productivity and efficiency in their data centres, whether they are on-premises or hosted. Valued as a key partner, Fusion’s clients began to request the company go beyond consulting to also offer turnkey IT infrastructure capabilities. To address the demand, Fusion made the strategic decision to team with a cloud provider to avoid committing resources to building its own data centre.
“Why reinvent the wheel?” commented Jeremy Bowman, IT Operations Director at Fusion. “There are plenty of cloud providers out there—it’s just a matter of finding the right one.”
Because Fusion’s customers often don’t have a clear picture of what they require when they first contract services, Fusion needed the flexibility to quickly adjust its mix of IT resources to accommodate changing needs. Additionally, it required a cloud provider that leveraged VMware technology and could also ensure high availability as well as optimal application and network performance. As a service provider, Fusion understood the importance of having a true partner instead of a vendor. As such, it sought a cloud provider that it could team with to strategise and quickly solve potential issues.
“By the end of the trial period, we were very confident that iland had the best technology, a workable business model, and most importantly, the right people,” says Bowman. “iland took the time to understand our business, showed that it was able to deliver superior 24x7x365 local support and proved the reliability of its cloud infrastructure.”
Choosing the iland Enterprise Cloud Services based on VMware technology provided Fusion tangible business benefits that include:
· Right-sizing easily – Fusion has the flexibility to fine-tune the level of resources needed by its customers’ application workloads as often as necessary. “We allocate resources at initial deployment and then adjust them in real time as the customer’s requirements change,” said Bowman. “Because of iland’s intuitive console and the inherent flexibility of the VMware architecture, the process is fast and easy, allowing our customers to respond quickly to changes in the marketplace.”
· Scaling rapidly – Perhaps the biggest surprise to Bowman was the speed with which iland can deploy additional infrastructure. “When we needed additional capacity in our on-premises data centre, it could take months to bring new resources online,” he said. “With iland and VMware, that number is just days.” The ability to scale rapidly gives Fusion an edge over competitors with fixed infrastructures.
· Avoiding costly downtime – Fusion’s customers expect high availability so that their employees can access the applications and data needed to do their jobs. “Thanks to VMware technology, iland provides us 100 percent availability that exceeds our SLAs to the customer,” said Bowman. “We don’t have to worry about the infrastructure at all.”
· Improving support with increased transparency – To manage the infrastructure side of the business efficiently, Fusion needed access to up-to-date platform status. “iland’s intuitive console gives us complete visibility into the infrastructure, end-to-end, so we can assess both performance and cost,” said Bowman. Fusion now can troubleshoot problems quickly and ensure more accurate billing based on the data provided through the iland console, which is part of iland Enterprise Cloud Services. “That level of transparency really helps us deliver responsive support and a quality user experience to our customers.”
