A recent survey has revealed that CIOs are twice as likely to focus on delivering IT services to their organisation as on innovation and moving the business forward. According to Managed Services Provider Claranet, outsourcing the responsibility of managing infrastructure to a third party can free up the time of CIOs and shift their mindset away from one of keeping the lights on towards one of delivering value to the business and growing the top line.

A global survey of more than 900 CIOs conducted by Deloitte has found that CIOs are twice as likely to prioritise the delivery of IT services over increasing profit and growth, and driving innovation: 55 per cent of CIOs identified delivering business outcomes through IT services as the most important element of their role, followed by enhancing customer experiences through technology, cited by 35 per cent of respondents. However, transforming IT from a cost centre to a profit centre and investing in emerging technologies were of lesser importance, selected by 22 per cent and 20 per cent respectively.

For Claranet’s CIO, Andy Wilton, the results, while not altogether surprising, speak more about the pressures that CIOs are under than their willingness or desire to innovate:

Given the considerable and growing amount of pressure CIOs are under to maintain service availability, these priorities come as little surprise. CIOs clearly recognise the need to innovate to support changing needs of the business, but faced with ever-heightening expectations of availability and a growing number of options as to where and how they host their data and applications, their ability to do so is hindered by inertia and by over-stated concerns over security and data sovereignty.

“The things that should keep the CIO awake at night are innovation and those things that can grow the top line – rather than simply keeping the lights on and keeping costs under control. In this sense, CIOs need to think more like CEOs and invest as much time and effort into growth and innovation as they do for service delivery. After all, while there’s a finite amount that you can control costs, there’s an infinite amount to which you can grow the top line,” Wilton continued.

“This shift in mindset is arguably easier said than done, but a key part of the transformation is having the right partners and suppliers in place to provide support and help them stop worrying about those things that they shouldn’t have to worry about. The technology supply chain has arrived at a point where CIOs can comfortably outsource the management of their IT infrastructure, freeing up their time to focus on building their core business,” he concluded.

Find out more:

• For more information about Claranet’s hosting portfolio, visit hosting services.
• For more information about Claranet’s communications portfolio, visit communications services.
• For more information about Claranet’s networks portfolio, visit networks services.

International events company finds additional flexibility with managed services suite

Richmond Events has called on Claranet to provide its whole IT infrastructure to allow it to scale in real time according to the needs of the business. In doing so, they have been able to maintain a competitive edge in a crowded market.

Richmond Events’ business model has always relied on advanced database marketing. The company has offices in London, New York and Basel as well as a sizable remote network of employees in several countries. It depends heavily on the intellectual property contained within its global IT systems, which is key to staying ahead of fierce competition from rivals, explained Liam Quinn, IT director at Richmond events:

Our differentiation is our data and how we use it to meet our clients’ needs. Customers can select from a rich set of supplier and conference information, which in turn produces new data that we can analyse and feedback in to the business. Delegates attending our events can create individual itineraries, which are unique to them. But sifting through this data and turning it to our advantage demanded time and technical resources, both of which were under strain.”

However, the company found itself struggling to meet increasing client expectations when it was forced to streamline its operations during the economic downturn. In addition, the business found that its IT estate wasn’t flexible enough to cope with changing customer demand, meaning that it was redundant at quiet periods, and under pressure when business picked up.

The company turned to Claranet to provide a solution that encompassed managed hosting, a private MPLS network and communication services – all provided in a fully managed service and support wrapper. In doing so, Richmond Events could drive down their overall IT spend and add new flexibility to their IT estate – without impacting operational capability. The role of the internal IT team also changed significantly, focusing less on managing infrastructure and more on guaranteeing a quality end user experience, thus maintaining the company’s differentiation in the market they operate in.

“Managed services give us the ability to make the right decisions at the right time so we always get good value and have services that are fit for purpose,” Quinn continued. “We now have the flexibility to run our business how we want to, yet have the support we need.

Importantly Claranet established a service agreement that is scalable to changing needs. By having a fixed user base contract with an ability to top up the service with extra users when needed, combines the economies of scale of a set fee with the flexibility of a pay-per-user model. Further, Richmond Events assessed its cloud needs for service up-time and support to make sure that they did not procure services that were not needed.

“Many organisations moving to the cloud insist in the highest levels of up-time and service. While on the face of it this makes sense, the reality is that few organisations need a guaranteed 99.999 per cent service up-time and the cost to demand this does not always give an improved ROI. It is important to be clear about the business requirements for cloud, otherwise you risk paying for services that are superfluous.”

Quinn concluded: “We had been searching for a panacea that would allow us to increase – or decrease – users as dictated by the needs of the business, and Claranet has helped us get there. Despite the fact we are now more virtualised than ever before, the performance of our servers is far superior and the costs are far lower with Claranet.”

Find out more:

• For more information about Claranet’s hosting portfolio, visit hosting services.
• For more information about Claranet’s communications portfolio, visit communications services.
• For more information about Claranet’s networks portfolio, visit networks services.

• First installation of new Cisco routers in Europe
• Continued investment in Claranet’s technologies and platforms

As part of an ongoing investment in its infrastructure, Claranet has invested over £1million to upgrade its UK core network. The Managed Services Provider completed the second phase of a major network upgrade in July 2014, part of the continued integration of Star following its acquisition in November 2012. The upgrade sees two distinct networks merged into one, delivering a faster, more efficient, and more flexible infrastructure to cater for customer requirements and significant growth in internet traffic.

Since 2012, Claranet has been running the two core networks (Claranet and Star) in parallel. The integration of the two legacy networks into a single core infrastructure, comprising of next generation Cisco ASR9900 series router – ensures that Claranet can offer its complete suite of products and services to all customers from a single platform. The first installation of this series of routers in Europe, the new technology is fit to meet the increasing demands on the MSP’s network, offering advanced features, greater stability, more efficiency and faster processors.

Claranet’s UK Managing Director, Michel Robert, said: “When we acquired Star in 2012, we inherited a network that met our requirements, but would not scale to what we felt would be required in the future. As a result, we decided to invest in a next-generation network infrastructure to support the expanded UK business.

“As a business, our integrated network is part of our core proposition, helping to guarantee our customers high-performance and secure cloud services, based on enterprise-class technology with a single SLA. But cloud services are only as reliable as the network on which they are delivered, and as enterprises place more business-critical applications in the cloud, network quality of service, reliability, and security become increasingly important. Regular upgrades and investment are therefore critical for maintaining optimal performance, ensuring that we can continue to deliver next-generation network architecture and a platform that will serve the changing needs of our customers,” Robert concluded.

Software-as-a-service, the process of delivering and accessing applications through the web has become the defacto method of software deployment.

End users want to access software on any device, anytime and anywhere. Independent software vendors want to be able to move toward a cloud based service model to meet customer demand, stay competitive and introduce recurring revenue streams.

The problem then is working out who should support the delivery of your software. At the outset there appears to be two options: either manage it in-house – requiring extra resource and expertise you may not possess– or work with a hosting or managed services provider.

In reality there may however be three options. Hosting providers only cover one part of the picture, the end platform, what they are not able to do is manage the application experience from the data centre to the end user’s device. This leads to a grey area where nobody is taking overall control for the application’s successful delivery. If there is an issue where performance is impacted or downtime occurs, this can turn into a finger pointing exercise between the host, the network provider, end users, and the software provider, as they seek to apportion blame on each other.

Managed services providers can provide the end-to-end infrastructure and management expertise to most effectively deliver your application. However, not all managed services providers are equal, and working with less evolved providers who don’t take the time to understand your business goals can lead to damage to your brand and revenue.

read more

Gartner publishes Magic Quadrant for Cloud-Enabled Managed Hosting, Europe 2014

For the second year in a row, Claranet has been positioned as a “Leader” in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud-Enabled Managed Hosting, Europe, published 9th July 2014 by Tiny Haynes et al., having been positioned in the Quadrant in 2013.

According to Gartner’s latest report, “Leaders have proved they have staying power in this market, can frequently innovate on their existing products and can be relied upon for enterprise-class needs. They have proved their technical competence and ability to deliver services to a wide range of customers. They can also address multiple cases with stand-alone or integrated solutions.”

According to Claranet’s CEO, Charles Nasser, he believes Claranet’s placement in the Quadrant reaffirms its position as the leading provider of integrated hosting, network and communications services to the mid-market in the UK and continental Europe.

Nasser said: “We believe that Claranet’s positioning in this Magic Quadrant comes as important recognition of the steps we have taken over the past year to strengthen our presence across Western Europe. The European hosting market is currently undergoing a significant shift as it consolidates around a handful of larger providers, of which Claranet is one.

“Agility has been a key component of our success to date, enabling us to respond rapidly to changes in the market and translating these into advantages for our customers. Our strategy is focused on the evolution of our service portfolio in order to leverage our own infrastructure and that of leading large-scale IaaS providers to take our managed hosting services to market. In doing so, we have been able to expand our managed hosting capabilities, broaden our product offering, and establish a strong corporate and financial base from which we can build the business.”

The Gartner Magic Quadrant assessment offers snapshots of markets and their participants. It enables users to map vendor strengths against their current and future needs. Gartner evaluated Claranet’s hosting portfolio on both its completeness of vision and its ability to execute using 15 weighted criteria.

Claranet has a long-standing history of offering outstanding hosting and network services, underpinned by top-class infrastructure, a single end-to-end SLA. These key attributes have allowed us to continue to exceed the needs of our customers as we pursue our ambitious European growth strategy,” Nasser concluded.

About the Magic Quadrant

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organisation and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

Find out more:

• For more information about Claranet’s hosting portfolio, visit hosting services.
• For more information about Claranet’s communications portfolio, visit communications services.
• For more information about Claranet’s networks portfolio, visit networks services.

The Very Hungry Caterpillar is a favourite book in the Saunders household. My two eldest sons used to love it, and more recently my two year old son now demands I read it every evening. He corrects me on most of the items the caterpillar eats (“No daddy it’s not a gherkin it’s a cucumber!”), but I’m fine with that. When you read a book so many times, you can’t help thinking about it in other contexts, and it’s occurred to me recently that most service providers involved with Internet technology (call them ISP, MSP, whatever) are going through the same evolution that the caterpillar did.

Most businesses have to deal with change, but as I’ve written before in From ISP to MSP, the MSP industry leads the field when it comes to the pace of change. Much of this is down to the rate of development of technology and the insatiable demand our customers have to consume this technology, but much of this is the MSPs own desire to broaden its portfolio and capture more of the potential spend of its customer’s IT budget.

Like the newly hatched caterpillar, most service providers start with something simple and grow by doing more of it (one strawberry, two apples), but growing is expensive, and once outside investors get involved, the hungry caterpillar develops a real appetite. This is the stage I think most of the service provider market is in right now, the innocence of the early days has gone, and the urge to grow faster and faster has resulted in many service providers branching out into non-core areas of business like building huge assets of data centres. Some MSPs will argue that building data centres is a necessary, core area, but I disagree. The clue is in the name, service is what a service provider is all about, not assets (well not of the financial/physical kind).

read more

The Very Hungry Caterpillar is a favourite book in the Saunders household. My two eldest sons used to love it, and more recently my two year old son now demands I read it every evening. He corrects me on most of the items the caterpillar eats (“No daddy it’s not a gherkin it’s a cucumber!”), but I’m fine with that. When you read a book so many times, you can’t help thinking about it in other contexts, and it’s occurred to me recently that most service providers involved with Internet technology (call them ISP, MSP, whatever) are going through the same evolution that the caterpillar did.

Most businesses have to deal with change, but as I’ve written before in From ISP to MSP, the MSP industry leads the field when it comes to the pace of change. Much of this is down to the rate of development of technology and the insatiable demand our customers have to consume this technology, but much of this is the MSPs own desire to broaden its portfolio and capture more of the potential spend of its customer’s IT budget.

Like the newly hatched caterpillar, most service providers start with something simple and grow by doing more of it (one strawberry, two apples), but growing is expensive, and once outside investors get involved, the hungry caterpillar develops a real appetite. This is the stage I think most of the service provider market is in right now, the innocence of the early days has gone, and the urge to grow faster and faster has resulted in many service providers branching out into non-core areas of business like building huge assets of data centres. Some MSPs will argue that building data centres is a necessary, core area, but I disagree. The clue is in the name, service is what a service provider is all about, not assets (well not of the financial/physical kind).

read more

Half of cloud users cite lack of in-house skills as a reason for adoption

A lack of in-house skills and experience in managing legacy systems and hardware is increasing reliance on outsourced IT. As businesses turn to cloud to supplement their workforces, providers must increasingly act as an extension of the IT department, says Claranet.

The latest research from the Cloud Industry Forum (CIF) indicates that availability of IT skills in the end-user workforce is heavily informing technology procurement practices; the industry body found that a lack of in-house skills was a factor in the decision to adopt cloud services in around half (49 per cent) of cloud users.

Simon Bearne, Claranet’s UK Sales & Marketing Director said: “Over the last decade, there has been a shift towards data and information management in IT departments – rather than the ‘nuts and bolts’ of IT. The fact is that many organisations cannot afford to hire software and hardware specialists, so have to outsource, appointing a Managed Services Provider (MSP) in place of the latter.

That businesses are turning to cloud to plug skills gaps in the workforce is not, in itself, a problem. After all, the ability to effectively rent resources and skills is what outsourcing and cloud are all about. With the UK suffering from a skills shortage in the IT industry, it makes much more sense for businesses to focus existing internal IT staff on higher-value strategic work that maximises their knowledge of the company’s IT systems and their understanding of the business, and to leave the more mundane work to those outside the organisation. But it does create an environment where businesses are increasingly reliant on outsourced IT – making the customer-IT provider relationship critical to business success.

Bearne went on to say that MSPs should play a central role in businesses’ migration strategies, to help determine which workloads to move to the cloud and which to keep on-premise:

“The direction of traffic is of course towards cloud, but the process is gradual and one that needs to be managed carefully. It’s important to realise that with limited resource and skills, a careful balance is needed between holding on to existing systems to achieve the best ROI and the benefits to business operations from using the cloud. While there is no easy answer, end-users should look for an MSP that will take a consultative approach to developing a more bespoke solution based on a full understanding of their requirements and existing skills base,” he concluded.

Find out more:

• For more information about Claranet’s hosting portfolio, visit hosting services.
• For more information about Claranet’s communications portfolio, visit communications services.
• For more information about Claranet’s networks portfolio, visit networks services.

Extract taken from an interview by Ben Sullivan on behalf of CRB – 04 July 2014. Follow this link to read the original interview.

Claranet, a European managed services provider, recently published research that revealed that the managed service provider industry needs to increase the level of support and transparency it gives its customers.

Claranet said that although cloud computing is now in the mainstream, there are still reservations about the costs and risks of using managed services.

CBR spoke to Martin Saunders, newly appointed Corporate Development Director at Claranet, to see what he thought about the issue of transparency in the cloud services world, and what he thinks service provisioners need to do to keep up with major players such as Amazon, Microsoft and Google.

Claranet recently conducted research into how end users feel about cloud and, in particular, if they trust providers. What would you say on the issue of transparency?

I think the transparency bit is really interesting. It’s something in the last couple of years that we’ve really started to understand the value of. We have a strategy focusing on building customer trust. For us, trust has four major elements in it. It’s about being expert, being reliable, being financially strong, and being transparent.

We act as a virtual member of the IT department. That’s not to say we’re replacing IT members but because we’re working on their behalf they really need to know what is going on. As IT gets more complex, in particular with the use of public clouds like Azure and Amazon coming along, you really need to have complete transparency as to what you’re using and how you’re using it and how that works so your customers have a good understanding of basically what’s going on in the background.

But I think it’s probably fair to say that transparency isn’t something that really comes naturally to the service provision industry. I don’t know whether it’s a case that service providers feel nervous that if you’re overly transparent you’re maybe exposing your hand to your customers or whether it comes from nervousness that perhaps if you’re overly transparent then you become too easy to replace.

But in the end, if you’re going to offer a good level of service you need to be very clear about what’s going on in the background.

Sometimes transparency can be taken too far, and certainly it’s blighted the service provider industry in the past. If something goes wrong then we’re all too quick to blame whoever it is in the background. If there’s a network outage then you blame the network carrier rather than taking responsibility for yourself. In the end transparency is key if you’re going to get the trust of customers.

What business models are Claranet using to compete with the Big Three: Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud?

We see the big three as an opportunity rather than a threat, and that’s to do with Claranet’s history. Claranet has never been an asset-heavy service provider. We’ve obviously had to have had some assets, but the data centres we have apart from one with the Star acquisition, are all suites of space within much larger purpose built facilities.

Partially that’s come out of necessity. We haven’t had the cash to go and build massive data centres. But actually now this puts us in a really strong position because we are asset-light, it actually makes a huge amount of sense for us to go and use Amazon or Azure or Google Cloud and not fight against it. That’s what is now very much driving the partnerships and the acquisitions that we’re looking to do going forwards. Because we have this asset-light position it’s actually a very natural conversation to have with Amazon or Microsoft or Google and say we’re very keen to use your public cloud services and we are a managed services company that can be a natural partner to them when they’re talking to organisations and they need to have a greater level of managed service that they can’t do themselves.

The market as whole is going to have quite a transformation over the next year or two. Hosting companies that really put their bet in asset-heavy builds in data centres and infrastructure are going to really struggle. They will either have to get acquired by one of the Big Three, or they’ll end up having to fairly drastically change their company direction. And they’ll find that hard because if they’ve got 15 years of data centre that they’ve got to right off, that’s not something that can be financially done very easily. There’s going to be a lot of consolidation and acquisitions happening over the next couple of years and we hope Claranet is going to be leading that from the Western Europe point of view.

What plans do you have to keep up with the constant price slashing of the bigger players?

It’s a challenge, definitely. Thankfully for us we derive a certain amount of our income from infrastructure but it’s not the be all and end all for us. The managed service piece is the most important thing. It does make it difference though, and it’s a competitive marketplace and it’s not like it’s the first time this has happened. We’ve had exactly the same thing happening for us on our network portfolio over the last five years. If you think back ten years ago, how much it would cost to get a 2MB leased line in London we were looking at 20-30 grand. You’re looking at 100MB for five-six grand now. Infrastructure will always consolidate and commoditise, but if you’re adding a good level of value and service on top and you don’t wear yourself down by making big bets on infrastructure that only last for three or four years then you’ll be okay and that’s basically what we’ve done.

Public clouds are great but they still only focus on one particular type of application and there’s an awful lot of IT workload that still isn’t that well suited to be hosted on Azure and Amazon. One of Claranet’s continued strategies is about making sure that we have what we call differentiated infrastructure. So be it higher availability, or more local services, or greater levels of transparency. There’s still a lot service providers can do to differentiate their infrastructure. But as every day and every week goes by that is getting harder. You’ve really got to fall back on the service to be your main point of differentiation.

Find out more:

• For more information about Claranet’s hosting portfolio, visit hosting services.
• For more information about Claranet’s communications portfolio, visit communications services.
• For more information about Claranet’s networks portfolio, visit networks services.

Businesses need to use cloud to develop a constant process of innovation

To date, retailers have used cloud to good effect, with cloud services facilitating greater agility, flexibility and rapid expansion into international markets. However, research from Accenture indicates that many still lack the ability to offer a seamless service to customers across all platforms, highlighting the importance of Managed Services Providers (MSPs) and the need to use cloud computing to better effect.

The Accenture Seamless Retail Capabilities Benchmark Study found that 81 per cent of retailers examined reported absent or underdeveloped capabilities in tailoring assortment, pricing and shopping occasion to customer expectations across channels.

Andy Wilton, Claranet’s Group CIO, comments:

IT systems are the bloodline to most businesses and, when these systems can no longer provide the right functionality, it can cause significant damage. Most businesses, and particularly those in the retail sector, are in constant flux, and have to adapt to changing market conditions and seek new ways to get ahead of competitors. Many have now established some of their IT in the cloud and it is important that they realise how to take advantage of its benefits to facilitate change.”

In moving to the cloud, companies have to decide how much managed support they want from their providers above and beyond the basic hosting service. At one end of the spectrum, organisations take a basic approach, just renting the IaaS and leaving the development and management of what is hosted in-house. At the other, end-users choose to have a fully managed solution. However, whatever the choice, there are two issues that need to be addressed – firstly how to migrate the existing IT services while ensuring business continuity and secondly, how to establish a continuous innovation team to take advantage of the flexibility that a cloud approach offers. Technology can keep pace with how the wider business is changing, but only if the right people are in place.

Organisations should look for MSPs that include specific support for application development, testing and deployment in a live environment, underpinned by strong service level agreements. These are all critical services for innovation that no longer have to be handled in-house.

This is necessary to ensure that any implemented service will cater to the requirements of a business and add value, whilst laying down a solid foundation that maintains control and provides flexibility. Having a bespoke design, that meets the business’s corporate requirements, will ensure minimum disruption and iron out potential problems. It also establishes a clear innovation path in partnership with the end-user.

Wilton concludes: “For many, choosing an MSP is the best option because it relieves the pressure on in-house teams as they adjust systems to changing operational demands from the wider business. Many business leaders have got used to the idea that IT will always lag behind the rest of the business. With cloud now mainstream, this is no longer the case.”

Learn more about Claranet’s retail solutions.

Find out more:

• For more information about Claranet’s hosting portfolio, visit hosting services.
• For more information about Claranet’s communications portfolio, visit communications services.
• For more information about Claranet’s networks portfolio, visit networks services.