The sky’s the limit: Acceleris and certified cloud solutions PROJECT SPONSOR
The sky’s the limit Acceleris & certified cloud solutions Wr i t te n by D a l e B e n t o n Pro d u c e d by D a n i e l l e H a r r i s
Acceleris has evolved from a small-scale reseller of microsystems to an ISO certified cloud service solutions provider. With plans to continue to push the boundaries of its offering, the sky really is the limit for Acceleris
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n the modern world of technology, IT and ICT systems software play a crucial part in almost every industry across the world. The task for companies is how to leverage their IT software to generate greater efficiencies and more importantly, lower operating costs. The technology in IT is transforming, with Big Data, IoT and cloud based software taking over, realising the cost benefits from innovation can prove a tricky business. This is where Acceleris comes in to play. An industry leader, providing ISO certified IT service solutions in Switzerland, Acceleris stands tall as ‘the’ go-to solutions provider, promising high and consistent quality solutions. But life at the company did not always revolve around cloud based solutions.
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Head in the clouds Acceleris was founded in 2003 by Pascal Stürchler as a reseller of Sun microsystems, and through a difficult period of searching for partnerships that would enable the company to grow into a systems integrator and further down the line a cloud service provider, Stürchler refocused the company through two major partners in Red Hat and Oracle. “We really moved from being a classical IT reseller who was just selling hardware and software and became a service provider for cloud solutions,” says Stürchler. Today, the company focuses on the delivery of cloud services and infrastructure. “We help the customers run really largescale infrastructure and help them operate said infrastructure properly, with high efficiency and
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Keeping business competitive and IT eco Cloud computing at a tipping point Cloud delivered computing is a reality. It has been around in one form or another for a decade but only recently has it been considered viable for a complete IT environment. The tipping point has been reached largely due to the availability of a broad range of IT services at a price point that cannot be ignored by business managers.Cloud offers business organizations a high degree of flexibility in determining how they enable their business, providing time or usage defined services which can be extended or contracted to meet the timely requirements of the business. Equally services can be acquired without large investment in software, hardware and the expertise required to run it. Specific services such as IOT based processes or big data management capabilities can be acquired for a fraction of the cost of a few years ago. This means that firms of all sizes can now afford what once were considered sophisticated IT services to support new business models. For example, customer engagement processes supported by SaaS apps in combination with chat bots, adaptive learning, information capture and management on Hadoop, NO-Sql or conventional RDBMS is paid via operating expenses. Subscriptionbased services provide scale flexibility, lowering up-front investments and lead times to realise business support. The security offered by large IT suppliers is typically far superior to that provided by internal services. Cloud
services providers are a viable alternative corporate IT. However, the cloud service provider is no substitute for in house IT which ensures the tactical and strategic support of the business via various suppliers. Adopting cloud computing The benefits of public / private cloud are apparent for most companies the transition to cloud is in some ways fraught with challenges • Need for a governance model to manage cloud service providers • Understanding how to integrate on premise and cloud systems • Local / national restrictions on data provenance • Adapting internal compliance policies and systems for security in a heterogeneous environment • Determining the cost of services. Little experience with subscription models Enterprises in regulated industries maybe constrained but it is not always abundantly clear where the limits are to be drawn. Before the adoption of cloud services risk, reward assessments are often a prerequisite. Oracle’s cloud offering Oracle has addressed obstacles to the adoption of public cloud services in 2 ways. 1. With introducing the “Cloud at Customer” cloud service delivery model 2. The launch of a Managed Service Provider programme
onomics in balance 1. Within the “Cloud at Customer” service delivery model the Oracle Cloud Machine (OCM), first offered in 2016, provides clients with a physical machine, configured to their specifications, behind their fire wall and on premise. This offers identical Oracle Public Cloud services at subscription on fully managed Oracle machines in the clients data centre. These services include • Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) incorporating compute, storage, network • Platform as a service (PaaS) including • Oracle Java Cloud Service • Oracle Integration Cloud Service • Oracle Database Cloud Service The range of building blocks in “Cloud at Customer” cloud service delivery model includes today, apart of OCM, additionally Exadata Cloud Machine (ExaCM) and Big Data Cloud Machine. The ExaCM is delivered with full database licensing and flexible configuration and offers bursting capability which can radically alter the sizing requirements and consequently the economics of acquiring and operating a server. The big data cloud machine provides Hadoop services. Additional “Cloud at Customer” units are expected in the next months. 2. The Oracle Cloud Managed Service Provider (MSP) program identifies and recognizes partners who have skills, tools and processes to build, deploy,
run, and manage Oracle and non-Oracle workloads on Oracle Cloud Platform. With the Oracle Cloud Managed Service Provider Program, partners reap the benefits of building their services on a world-class cloud infrastructure, and customers receive the complete solution they need to optimize their cloud initiatives – reducing risk, cost, and complexity. If required the solution can be delivered on premise against the “Cloud at Customer” model. This provides companies with a trusted local management of Oracle’s cloud services. Capitalising on Oracle’s Cloud offering Oracle’s “Cloud at Customer” offerings are cost effective infrastructure building blocks. If desired Oracle’s clients can select from the MSP Partners to manage customers’ cloud infrastructure, and/or end-user systems, and provide services including cloud advisory, service migration, DevOps, provisioning and orchestration, monitoring, 24x7 monitoring, incidence and change management, and cloud optimization, among many others. Upon qualification, Oracle Cloud Managed Service Providers can purchase Oracle Cloud Platform products for customers, package their MSP services, and provide a complete solution to the customer. This model shifts responsibility for all maintenance and support to the MSP Partner allowing clients to take full benefit of the cloud services. Pricing of the MSP is consistent with the equivalent service available in Oracle Public Cloud.
all within a secure environment.” This transformation towards a cloud service solutions provider has taken place over the last four years and following the decision to move into this direction, the company sought out ISO certifications to cement its position in the market. But as with any transformation, the decision was not made without reason. One major factor in this was the role of the customer, with Stürchler noting that customers are switching from capital expenditure to operating expense. “Customers don’t want to invest in hardware, they just want to consume IT,” he says. More and more small to medium sized companies are switching operating models to become more like e-commerce businesses. This in turn means these companies are seeking ICT operations that can run 24 hours a day, seven days a week. This presents a major problem for these companies – operating costs. “The costs for this kind of operation is too high, so companies are turning towards infrastructure partners and cloud services. This allows them
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to have a guaranteed service-level agreement and they can be safe in the knowledge that their e-commerce business is operating to those 24/7 requirements,” Stürchler says.
Leading the pack Acceleris defines itself on its cloud infrastructure NUBIQ, going as far as calling it as one of the most up to date cloud infrastructures in Switzerland. This is due to the fact that it is fully software defined. This means that Acceleris has software defined storage, network and compute power in an “open spec and open defined” open stack infrastructure. To put that into context, there are currently three open stack infrastructures across Switzerland and Acceleris is one of them. “With open spec and open defined infrastructure, we are able to provide cloud infrastructure on an incredibly large scale,” says Stürchler. An advantage of such an infrastructure over say, Amazon or Azure, is that it allows Acceleris to provide services, backup / restore, security and, if necessary,
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“Customers don’t want to invest in hardware, they just want to consume IT”
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www.redhat.com/en/global/switzerland
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Acceleris can run the whole server leader in cloud infrastructure through managed services. services is the company’s ISO “We can really work in a hybrid certifications - the holy grail of the service level agreement. That ICT service solution provider space. is unlike no other company in To date, Acceleris has obtained five Switzerland,” Stürchler adds. ISO certifications and is one of the Acceleris is a company that in only companies to have done so. The essence is defined by its customers. most recent certification, and arguably Through the company’s base the most important with regards to in Switzerland, it provides an handling customer data in the cloud opportunity for space, is ISO 27018. customer engagement This certification is that is unrivalled. a code of practice “The response from for the protection of customers has really personally identifiable been amazing,” he says. information and “They really like the it provides a key The year Acceleris advantage for fact that we are based was founded in Switzerland and can Acceleris in a market have direct engagement that is ever growing. with our engineers. This allows a level “It shows that we have proper of service that can tailor to specific processes in place and it guarantees requirements and needs through the customers that we have a high one to one meetings. Customers are standard of security,” says Stürchler. really taking to the truly support role “It guarantees to them that each our engineers can have for them.” employee knows how exactly those safety processes are working. Certification for success It guarantees high quality.” Of course, one of the major factors The employee and the employee’s in Acceleris becoming a market knowledge of the company’s data
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processes is crucial to the business, and this is an area that has historically provided the biggest challenge to the business. With every new software defined technology comes increased complexity and this is something that Stürchler is all too aware of. “We must train our engineers and educate them continuously. Acceleris has invested heavily into this area over the last four years and we will continue to do so,” he says. Security threats and the way in which Acceleris approaches the issue of cyber security is a fundamental issue that the company values extremely highly in the world of data handling. “We check our processes on a half-year basis and we check our risk management,” he says. Part of the way Acceleris invests in the security of its processes is through the use of third parties and “controlled” hacks. This is where Acceleris allows a trusted third party to hack into their infrastructure in a controlled environment to identify potential security threats and open doors that could cause further problems. It is through this approach that
Acceleris was able to avoid the threat of the global RansomWare cyber-attack earlier this year. “We were really prepared on that front and our system was not, and is not, at risk as a direct result of our preparedness,” says Stürchler.
Powered by partners The cycle for new releases of the latest technologies is becoming increasingly shorter and customers are increasingly demanding these technologies. Thus, Stürchler has been able to call upon the support from its major partners, Oracle and Red Hat. “Reliable partnerships are the basis for our business success. In order to be able to concentrate on our core competencies, we therefore rely on strong and long-term partners,” says the company website, and this is certainly a feeling shared by Stürchler. Acceleris sits on the board of both Oracle and Red Hat as well as having the highest certification as partners. This allows Red Hat and Oracle to work together with Acceleris on the training and educating of its employees to be able to provide the latest state
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of the art knowledge and state of the art services to customers. Through these reliable partnerships, Acceleris will also gain new business as both Oracle and Red Hat will point customers into the direction of the company when looking for the “right partner”. “Acceleris is held in high regard from these big companies as a service solution provider with an extremely high level of service and knowledge,” says Stürchler.
Reach for the sky For Stürchler, the past four years with Acceleris has been a period of tremendous growth and there is a clear strategy in place to continue to grow and be recognised as a partner of choice when it comes to cloud infrastructure solutions. The cloud service solutions market is continuously evolving, with a major trend seeing customers seeking out
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more private cloud infrastructure and Acceleris is already on the ball in this regard, with plans to run private cloud offerings as early as fall 2017. Looking a little further ahead into the future, Stürchler sees the company expanding its offering to match the demand for technologies such as IoT, Big Data and analytics. But there will also be a growth from an internal perspective. “We are moving away from the traditional hierarchy organisation into a modern, more agile and project oriented organisation where the people are having more responsibility,” Stürchler says. “For the future, it’s about the agility and the time to market. It means we need a new kind of organisation. We want an agile organisation that can react to the demands of the customers, the market as well as our internal stuff.”
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“We are moving away from the traditional hierarchy organisation into a modern, more agile and project oriented organisation where the people are having more responsibility�
www.acceleris.ch