Leading pan-European managed services provider Claranet will be the sole platinum sponsor at this year’s AWS Summit London, taking place on 28 June at the ExCeL. Platinum sponsorship is the highest level of sponsorship available, and Claranet’s sponsorship represents the next step in a business relationship that has enabled the company to help customers across Europe take advantage of the full breadth and sophistication of the AWS platform.

The AWS Summit designed to help attendees learn how to maximise the benefits of cloud computing to their organisations and to securely accelerate cloud adoption. Claranet has developed close links with AWS over the last few years, driven by the increasing popularity of the platform as a way to unlock a wide variety of business benefits. The company achieved the highest level of AWS partnership in late 2016 – Premier Consulting Partner status – indicating that it has both the technical expertise and the experience AWS deployments required to meet the huge appetite for the AWS platform in the market.

Sam Bashton, Head of Claranet’s Cloud Practice, commented:

AWS has proved to be the bedrock of business agility and digital transformation for many of our customers, and it forms a critical part of our offering. We have invested a lot into the relationship in recent years, and this is reflected in our AWS Premier Consulting Partner status, and now in our platinum sponsorship of this year’s Summit. Developing a European-wide cloud practice has enabled us to bring the benefits of AWS to a wide variety of businesses, moulding the diverse capabilities of the platform to the specific requirements of our customers.”

Claranet has made several strategic acquisitions over the last few years to support its cloud practice and its capacity to work with AWS. Most recently, at the end of May it purchased French cloud and DevOps specialist Oxalide to reinforce its ability to deploy and manage critical web applications in the cloud.

Sam concluded by underlining the significance of cloud computing in modern ICT, and the role of AWS in this:

Looking at how the industry has been inundated with talk of cloud’s value for the last few years, one might be mistaken for thinking that there is a lot of hype. However, when you look to everything from how consumers listen to music on their daily commute to how employees access their documents whilst working from home, it’s clear that cloud computing has had a transformative impact. AWS has been at the heart of this transformation for over a decade, allowing a variety of businesses to access the many benefits of the cloud, and we’re proud to support them in this endeavour.”

Leader position retained for the fifth year running

Claranet believes that its placement in the Quadrant underlines once again the market-leading position it holds in the European hosting industry. This latest recognition also follows Claranet’s placement in Gartner’s inaugural Magic Quadrant for Public Cloud Infrastructure Managed Service Providers, Worldwide, in March this year.

Commenting on the company’s placement in the Quadrant, Charles Nasser, Claranet’s CEO, said:

“We are proud to be recognised by Gartner in this year’s Magic Quadrant, which we believe reflects the work we do as an organisation to continually improve our hosting expertise and capabilities.

“This year has seen us continue our focus on offering best-in-class private and public cloud managed services and we have invested heavily to ensure that we can meet the often-complex needs of our customers and their mission critical applications. Fundamentally, it is applications and data that keep an organisation’s wheels turning so having the infrastructure, tooling and expertise to achieve the right balance of security, availability, performance and cost is essential.

“We have cultivated strong relationships with the leading hyper-scale public cloud providers over the last few years. This, combined with our own infrastructure, application expertise and heritage in network provision, means that we are able to deliver leading-edge hybrid cloud solutions that help our customers do amazing things. We believe this gives us the edge in an incredibly competitive and fast-paced environment,”

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.

In its latest report, published by Tiny Haynes et al. in June Gartner states:

“Leaders have proved they have staying power in this market, can frequently innovate on their existing products and can be relied on for enterprise-class needs. They have proved their technical competence and ability to deliver services to a wide range of customers. They address multiple use cases with stand-alone or integrated solutions. They also have a presence in multiple European locations to offer solutions around data sovereignty requirements.”

Looking at the challenges facing IT teams, Charles Nasser added:

“With IT departments facing significant pressure to innovate and add value to their organisations – without compromising security – they need suppliers supporting them who can meet their demands and align effectively with their strategic objectives. To achieve greater agility and efficiency, and therefore free up time to be spent on innovation, it is crucial for businesses to have their application and infrastructure services in order and in the right place.”

To find out more about this year’s Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Managed Hybrid Cloud Hosting, Europe, 2017, and to read a full version of the report, please continue below:

Read the full Gartner report

The e-gaming industry’s most prestigious awards event recognises Ardenta as IT Supplier of the Year

Ardenta, part of the Claranet Group, is delighted to announce that it has been named the winner of EGR B2B’s coveted IT Supplier of the Year award for the fourth time in five years. The ceremony, held at London’s exclusive Hurlingham Club, celebrates excellence and innovation in the online gaming industry.

Established seven years ago by the widely-respected E-Gaming Review, which provides news, expert analysis and comment on industry issues, the EGR B2B Awards recognise the very best suppliers operating across all the major online gaming disciplines, including betting and gaming software, networks, mobile, payments, recruitment, IT and infrastructure. A host of the industry’s leading players including OpenBet, Betradar and Playtech featured on this year’s shortlist, judged by an independent panel of external experts.

Neil Truby, MD and co-founder of Ardenta, commented:

We are immensely proud to have been named IT Supplier of the Year at the EGR B2B Awards. Winning this award for the fourth time in five years demonstrates clearly that we are providing our customers with the very best IT solutions for their business, through consistent innovation and a focus on delivering agility, reliability and flexibility. This award comes at a very exciting time for Ardenta as we continue to develop our service and offer our customers with unparalleled IT solutions.”

Brad Allen, EGR news editor, added:

Many congratulations to Ardenta for winning IT Supplier of the year at last night’s EGR B2B Awards.”

Judges noted Ardenta’s flexible approach to the e-gaming industry and its list of tier one clients, as well as the company’s evolution into a modern-day IT provider, led by the development of its scalable cloud-based solutions.”

Claranet, the managed services IT provider, has been awarded 170th place in The Sunday Times International Track 200 for 2017. Published on 11 June 2017, the table ranks the 200 privately owned companies in Britain with the fastest-growing international sales. This latest accolade is the second time Claranet has appeared in The Sunday Times’ Fast Track series this year, having been listed 93rd in the Profit Track 100 ranking.

Over the course of the past year, Claranet has continued to expand rapidly as a leader in Public Cloud and Security, bringing its technology solutions to an ever-increasing range of markets in the UK and beyond. Acquisitions and organic growth have both been key priorities for Claranet in the past 12 months, and have seen the company reach new heights in terms of its overall size and ability to serve new and existing customers.

In December, Claranet acquired Brazilian cloud services provider CredibiliT, marking its first foray into South America, and confirming its status as one of the most ambitious and dynamic players in the global private, public and hybrid cloud hosting environments. This was followed in February by the establishment of Claranet Italy, designed to support the growing demand for managed public cloud solutions in the Italian market.

Maintaining this momentum, Claranet announced in late May that it had acquired three additional companies: Sec-1 in the UK, Oxalide in France and ITEN Solutions in Portugal. These acquisitions represent a 40% growth in revenues and a significant step forward for Claranet, confirming the company’s market-leading position in France and Portugal and boosting its Group-wide security and application management capabilities for the benefit of its customers.

To support this activity, Claranet has also completed a refinancing exercise, providing the company with long-term funding and an incremental acquisition facility of £80 million. The organisation has also taken on new minority shareholders, including investment management firm Tikehau Capital, with the refinancing provided by ABN AMRO, Bank of Ireland, HSBC, Natixis, Partners Group, Royal Bank of Scotland, Société Générale and Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation.

Charles Nasser, founder and CEO of the Claranet Group, said:

The acquisitions we have made over the last year, along with our continued organic growth and refinancing exercise, has meant we have been able to establish a significant operation in the managed IT services market both at the European level and beyond. In many ways, this places us ahead of our competitors in the markets in which we operate and securing a place in the International Track 200 is a reflection of the success of this work.”

We’re looking forward to consolidating our position further over the coming months, making sure we can continue to provide the widest variety and highest quality of services to help our customers do amazing things.”

Claranet, a leading managed IT services provider, has today announced the acquisition of three IT services providers in the UK (Sec-1), France (Oxalide), and Portugal (ITEN Solutions), significantly increasing its revenues and service capabilities. Claranet has also completed a refinancing exercise, which provides the company with long-term financing and an incremental committed acquisition facility of £80million, and taken on new minority shareholders, including Tikehau Capital, who has invested alongside existing shareholders.

The three new acquisitions bring additional Security, DevOps, Systems Integration and IT services capabilities to the Claranet Group and cement its position as one of the largest independent providers of cloud and managed services in Western Europe and Brazil. The expanded Group has annualised revenues of £310million (€360million), more than 1,800 employees, and over 6,500 customers, and an international footprint in eight countries on two continents (UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal, The Netherlands, and Brazil).

Based in Leeds, UK, Sec-1 is a security solutions provider. Established in 2001, the company provides penetration testing and vulnerability assessments for applications and infrastructure, firewalls and malware protection, and security training services. Sec-1, which has a turnover of £6million and approximately 60 members of staff, adds significantly to Claranet’s security expertise. Its founders, Matt Hawnt and Gary O’Leary-Steele, will remain with Claranet and will work with the wider senior management team to continue to grow the business and take its services to Claranet’s customers in the UK and across Europe.

French DevOps and cloud specialist Oxalide will reinforce Claranet’s capacity to deploy and manage critical web applications. Established in 2003, the company already has a turnover of €17.5million (£15million), and its 95 staff serve customers ranging from Canal+ to Direct Energie. Oxalide’s management team will remain in situ and will develop the company’s proposition whilst benefiting from the financial stability and an enlarged portfolio with Claranet.

Founded in Portugal in 2013 through a merger of two of the largest companies in the Portuguese ICT sector, ITEN Solutions has annual revenues of €80million (£69million) and 360 staff. With this acquisition Claranet has become one of the largest IT services providers in Portugal and aims to help its customers to take advantage of new technologies.

The refinancing has been provided by the following financial institutions: ABN AMRO, Bank of Ireland, HSBC, Natixis, Partners Group, The Royal Bank of Scotland, Société Générale and Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation, replacing current debt suppliers.

Charles Nasser, founder and CEO of the Claranet Group, commented:

Claranet’s organic growth, combined with acquisitions, has meant we have established a significant operation in the managed IT services market at the European level, which we believe puts us ahead of many of our competitors in the region. These latest acquisitions represent a significant step forward for Claranet, confirming our market-leading position in France and Portugal and boosting our Group-wide security and application management capabilities for the benefit of our customers.”

We’re pleased that investment management firm Tikehau Capital has acquired a minority stake in Claranet, which along with our refinancing is a great endorsement of our strategy. The refinancing, and these latest acquisitions, means that we are even better positioned to meet the opportunities and challenges of a rapidly evolving technology services sector. We expect to see a continued consolidation of the European managed services market over the next 24-months and we are on a strong footing in all major markets in Western Europe to take advantage of this opportunity to help our customers do amazing things.”

Work anywhere capabilities of Office 365

Despite moving away from being an agrarian economy over the past two centuries, Britain is still a country that can be affected dramatically by the weather. Then there are other factors to consider, like fire, theft or negligence that threaten your organisation. For business both large and small, the impact of a system outage or data loss event can be severe.

Take weather for example. From heavy snow, to April showers that become May flooding, weather extremes can knock a business off-line – sometimes for several days.

As the name would imply, Big Data is indeed getting bigger. Not only are businesses analysing more and more metrics, but the actual size of the information store is growing exponentially.
For the IT manager, this is a technical challenge – but the rest of the business is most interested in the insights being generated.
However, there are two problems with many Big Data projects:

UK IT departments spend just 8 per cent of time on innovation; the least amount of time in Europe, finds Claranet

Research by managed services provider Claranet has revealed that UK IT departments are spending less time than their European colleagues on innovation, instead demonstrating a preference for operational projects and maintenance tasks. This indicates that the UK is at serious risk of falling behind its European counterparts, most of whom are embracing innovative IT practices on a much larger scale.

Vanson Bourne surveyed 900 IT leaders and decision makers across the six European countries in which Claranet operates – the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Portugal and the Benelux nations. The survey results have shown that UK IT leaders devote just 8 per cent of their time to innovation, compared to an average of 11 per cent across all the countries polled. The UK figure is well behind Benelux and France, spending 12 per cent and 13 per cent of their time respectively.

In addition, IT departments in the UK are responsible for driving the least amount of innovation in their respective organisations, at just 34 per cent. This is compared to 43 per cent in France and 44 per cent in Spain.

This data suggests that a culture of inertia has been allowed to develop in IT departments in the UK, in which IT managers have become more concerned with keeping the lights on, rather than finding ways in which they can add value to their businesses.

Andy Wilton, CIO at Claranet, commented:

Given the workloads that IT departments have to cope with, it is understandable to an extent that decision makers might choose to focus on running a tight ship rather than taking a step or two into the unknown. However, innovation across all aspects of a business is crucial to maintaining competitive advantage, and IT departments should not be exempt from this.”

Other countries in Europe are demonstrating that a focus on innovation is very much a possibility, and appear to be leading the UK in this regard. It is vital that IT departments prioritise closing this gap before ang long-term damage is done to the UK’s reputation as a centre for innovative business practices.”

To help address this imbalance between the UK and the continent, Wilton believes IT departments should focus on being less inward-looking in their approach, and look to how more innovative companies are leveraging technology and business practices to help position their entire business more favourably in the market.

He added:

Embracing a DevOps approach enables IT departments to be much more agile in terms of how they carry out their projects, and helps to better connect the role of the IT department to the business as a whole. In addition, making the most of the expertise and fresh approach offered by external IT service providers can give departments a much greater deal of flexibility when it comes to choosing solutions that work best for their individual needs.”

The statistics should serve as a stern warning to IT departments across the UK: bring innovation to the top of the agenda, or risk being left behind.”

Charles Nasser, CEO of Claranet, to give keynote speech at Cloud Expo Europe on the real-world challenges of digital transformation.

Digital transformation must start with customer needs if it is to be truly innovative, meaning leaders need to move out of the IT department and onto the front line of their organisations more than ever. The message Charles Nasser will take to Cloud Expo Europe is that for IT to be genuinely transformational, it has to leap-frog the current activities of businesses and listen to the basic needs of customers – the purpose of any business.

Charles Nasser, founder and CEO of Claranet, commented:

Businesses are always looking for new ways to serve their customers and from our experience IT leaders must be at the forefront of this improvement. Companies that embrace change are moving faster, but organisations that are slower to react face a challenging future, with legacy systems and old-fashioned business processes impeding progress. In order to foster innovation, and to prevent companies from lagging behind, it is recommended that senior decision makers need a highly strategic mind-set that sits right next to the customer, to help their businesses become digitally mature organisations.”

However, there is an idea that digital transformation means wholesale, overnight change. For most, this is simply unrealistic and a more iterative process of change is a better way to serve customers. Businesses cannot afford to reimagine their entire IT estate all at once. Companies are recommended to focus on building flexibility, agility and the right security into their IT environments so they can respond to changing conditions and can get the IT department in a position to lead innovation.”

For Claranet, ‘digital’ refers to applications and data and in implementing an effective customer-first approach. Organisations should consider where their applications and data are best located for maximum customer and competitive benefit. Having applications and data managed in the right location enables organisations to continually optimise availability, performance, security, scalability and cost.”

Organisations want to focus on continuously improving their business but if they don’t have the right infrastructure foundations, automation and customer-centric culture, it’s almost impossible to make improvements at a pace that customers now demand. Businesses can reduce this burden by working closely with a trusted provider who can help them to gain and sustain competitive advantage. The right partner is increasingly viewed as an extension of the IT team – freeing businesses up to focus on activities that lead to differentiation.”

Charles Nasser will be discussing ‘Reimagining the Business of IT’ in his keynote speech at Cloud Expo Europe 2017.

Meeting the rigorous standards reinforces Claranet’s depth of experience on Google Cloud Platform and its ability to help customers’ business transformation

European managed services provider Claranet is now part of the Google Cloud Partner Program and has achieved Premier status and the Partner Specialisation in Infrastructure. This is in acknowledgement of the strength of its Google Cloud practice and its proven success in migrating and managing Google Cloud Platform infrastructure. This announcement was made at the Google Cloud Next event in San Francisco.

The Google Cloud Partner Program is designed to help partners build their practices or products on the Google Cloud Platform in order to help them reach higher levels of success. The Partner Specialisation recognises strong customer success and technical proficiency.

Claranet is one of the launch partners recognised for the Infrastructure Specialisation, due to its deep Google Cloud Platform expertise and strong track record in building Google Cloud Platform infrastructure and automation.

Claranet offers a holistic hybrid IT approach and has made strategic investments to build centres of excellence for delivering managed services on third-party cloud platforms that extends across Europe, and recently Brazil. These latest recognitions from Google Cloud demonstrate the strength of Claranet’s offering and its place at the leading edge of cloud deployments.

Charles Nasser, Founder & CEO, at Claranet, said:

Achieving Google Cloud Premier Partner and Infrastructure Specialisation status is an important step forward for Claranet. Google Cloud provides opportunities for significant business transformation by allowing customers to rapidly develop high-performance applications and leverage data assets. Helping customers improve through effective use of platforms such as Google Cloud is central to Claranet’s proposition and reinforces our commitment to customers and our ability to help them gain competitive advantage.”

We see partner accreditations like this one as an important element in helping customers select the right partners to enable them to leverage the highly innovative infrastructure available on Google Cloud Platform. Claranet services and support provide the assessment, migration and ongoing application management to help deliver the right levels of availability, performance and security. Meeting the rigorous standards required to be one of the first companies to join the Google Cloud Partner Specialisation Program recognises our ability to help our customers win in their respective markets.”