Category Archives: Managed services

acquisition, Easynet, Interoute, M&A, Managed services, News & Analysis

Interoute buys Easynet for £402 million

interoute logoNetwork and cloud service operator Interoute has entered an agreement to buy European managed services provider Easynet in a deal valued at £402 million.

Easynet manages services for clients including Sports Direct, EDF, Bouygues, Anglian Water, Bridgestone, Levi Strauss and Campofrio Food Group. It has a twenty year pedigree of running integrated networks, hosting and unified communications solutions to national and global clients. Its data center and cloud computing services include colocation, security, voice and application performance management. It has been appointed by the UK government’s Procurement Service to assist the UK Government in creating a ‘network of networks’ with an emphasis on machine to machine (M2M) development.

Interoute’s technology estate includes 12 data centres, 14 virtual data centres and 31 colocation centres along with connection to 195 additional third-party data centres across Europe. It owns and operates 24 connected city networks within Europe’s major business centres.

According to Interoute, the acquisition means that enterprise, government and service provider customers of the two companies will get a fuller suite of products, services and skillsets.

“These are exciting times for Interoute customers,” said Interoute CEO Gareth Williams, “Interoute is creating a leading, independent European ICT provider. This is the next step in our acquisition strategy and moves us much closer to our goal of being the provider of choice to Europe’s digital economy.”

Easynet CEO Mark Thompson reassured customers that the combination of the two service providers will bring better service to clients of both. “The combined companies can offer broader and deeper connectivity options, as well as an expanded portfolio of products and services,” said Thompson. “The acquisition will expand an already market-leading cloud hosting capability in Europe.”

Williams had previously told analysts that Interoute needed to grow before going public. The takeover will double revenue in the division that sells telecoms services to large companies and government departments.

British telco Easynet became one of the champions of broadband competition in Britain after it was acquired in 2006 by Sky for £211 million. In 2010, Easynet announced its sale from BSkyB (Sky) to Lloyds Development Capital (LDC), the private equity arm of Lloyds Banking Group.

In December 2013 the company was acquired by MDNX Group, the UK’s largest independent carrier integrator.

Interoute was recently recognised by market analyst Gartner as a leader in its 2015 Magic Quadrant for Cloud-Enabled Managed Hosting, Europe report.

Featured, IT Management, Managed services

Build-Operate-Transfer Model: Creating a Valuable Framework for IT

The build-operate-transfer model is about taking the concept of a long term outsourced service, traditional in the Managed Services space, and addressing it in a way that allows the customer to get value out of the services at the end of the engagement. It’s also a way to address challenges within the IT operational team that feel like their services are being replaced by outside services.

With a build-operate-transfer model, you really need to start with the end-game in mind. Where are you going to be in 5 years? 7 years? 10 years? Are the services you’re consuming today going to be the same services you need then? How could your future plans be altered (mergers, acquisitions, etc.)? You need a way to be able to transfer those services but get value out of what you have been consuming in the previous term. That’s what the build-operate-transfer model is all about.

 

 

The corporate IT department has evolved. Has yours kept pace?

 

By Geoff Smith, Director, Managed Services Business Development

Deloitte, managed security, Managed services, Mike Denning, News & Analysis, Verizon

Verizon tries to woo CSOs with managed security offering

Verizon is boosting its managed security practice

Verizon is boosting its managed security practice

Verizon is throwing its hat into the managed security services ring this week, launching a managed cybersecurity and incident monitoring service targeted at large enterprises.

The Unified Security Services includes a pre-configured set of features managed by Verizon directly and designed to protect the network edge.

Verizon said it will provide service event monitoring, device alerting and 24/7 security support as well as patch management as part of the suite.

“With Unified Security Services, we have bundled together technology, human expertise and deployment services into one convenient offering,” said Mike Denning, vice president of Global Security at Verizon Enterprise Solutions.

“This solution is aimed at helping organizations — with little to no internal staff — better safeguard their networks, without adding complexity or more resources to their IT teams,” he said.

The suite will initially be rolled out in the US with plans to offer hosted versions globally in 2016.

The launch would suggest its partnership with Deloitte, announced in the Spring, is bearing fruit. In April the companies announced a partnership to deliver a comprehensive set of cybersecurity and risk-management solutions to enterprises.

As part of that deal Verizon said it would leverage its experience in digital forensics and managed services and Deloitte its cyber risk advisory services to deliver end-to-end incident response services.

Azure, Channel, Managed services, Microsoft, News & Analysis, Rackspace, Scott Guthrie, Taylor Rhodes

Rackspace to offer support for, resell Microsoft Azure

Rackspace is set to offer support for Azure customers and resell Microsoft's public and private cloud technology

Rackspace is set to offer support for Azure customers and resell Microsoft’s public and private cloud technology

In another move aimed at shifting its business towards managed (cloud) services Rackspace this week announced it will extend its ‘fanatical support’ services to Microsoft Azure public and private cloud infrastructure.

Rackspace said customers will be able to buy either bundled Azure infrastructure with support, or just support services. The offerings will be available first in the US, with plans for an international rollout “through early 2016.”

“Our strategy at Rackspace has always been to provide the world’s best expertise and service for industry-leading technologies — including a broad selection of Microsoft products,” said Taylor Rhodes, chief executive at Rackspace.

“We’re pleased to expand our relationship with Microsoft and the options we provide for our customers by offering Fanatical Support for Azure. By adding support for Azure to our portfolio, we can now serve customers who want public, private and hybrid cloud environments built on the Microsoft Azure Stack,” Rhodes said.

Rackspace already offers a range of Microsoft-based managed services and support but the latest move will see the company double down on the service component for the newly re-architected Azure Stack, including Microsoft’s own public cloud.

The move is also yet another step in Rackspace’s broader transformation from a pure-play hosting and cloud provider towards a managed services and managed cloud company.

Scott Guthrie, executive vice president of Microsoft’s Cloud and Enterprise group said: “Fanatical Support for Azure and Azure Stack adds Rackspace’s industry-leading support to Microsoft’s deep experience with the hybrid cloud, creating a win-win for customers. With this relationship, our mutual customers will have even more options for migrating their diverse IT workloads to the cloud.”

Atos, M&A, Managed services, Michel-Alain Proch, News & Analysis, outsourcing, Thierry Breton, Xerox

Atos completes acquisition of Xerox’s IT outsourcing biz

Atos has finalised the acquisition of Xerox's outsourcing business

Atos has finalised the acquisition of Xerox’s outsourcing business

French IT services outfit Atos announced this week the company has completed its €811m acquisition of Xerox’s IT outsourcing business, a move the companies said would give the combined entity a massive leap forward in the outsourcing market.

Originally announced on the tail end of last year Atos and Xerox agreed to a net total acquisition price of $966m (€ 811m), composed of $950m and an additional $50m assuming certain performance metrics were hit, plus $100m representing the estimated value of future tax benefits to Atos.

Xerox’s ITO business includes about 9,800 employees in 45 countries, with most – 4,500 – based in the US and more than 3,800 in global delivery countries.

Atos said the move, which gives it some strong capabilities in business process outsource and document outsourcing, means North America becomes its largest segment. While the company is popular in the Europe and the UK it’s currently ranked number 9 in North America in terms of outsourcing revenue.

“Today marks a major step in the development of the Atos Group, as we welcome 9,600 Xerox ITO employees to Atos,” said Thierry Breton, Chairman and chief executive of Atos. “With the US now our largest market, we have a stronger and more balanced global presence, which combined with our digital skills, allows us to be the trusted partner for our clients’ digital journey anywhere in the world.”

The companies also announced a deal that would see Atos become one of Xerox’s primary IT service providers globally.

Michel-Alain Proch, group senior executive vice president and recently appointed chief executive of Atos’s North American operations added: “Together with Xerox teams, we have worked extensively to be ready from day one post-closing and we are now fully operational to ensure continued delivery of services to our clients while at the same time leveraging the combined strengths of the two groups for profitable growth.”

Colt, IT services, KVH, Managed services, News & Analysis, Rakesh Bhasin, Vendor

Colt bows to competition, exits IT services

Colt is bowing out of the increasingly saturated IT services market

Colt is bowing out of the increasingly saturated IT services market

In a bid to increase profitability Colt announced this week that the company would exit the IT services market and put greater focus on its “core” services including its network, voice and datacentre services.

The company said its “managed exit” from the IT services market would also allow it to focus on offering datacentre services (colocation, cloud) and optimise use of its assets.

“Our IT services business would continue to need considerable investment in the short-to-medium term in order to deliver profitability and we do not believe this business can compete and grow successfully with a level of risk that is acceptable,” the company said in a statement Tuesday.

“Colt will continue to honour existing customer contracts through to termination, but will no longer seek new business.”

“The recent performance of IT Services has shown few signs of improving in accordance with the targets we set to deliver appropriate profit and cash returns in the medium term.”

The company anticipates the move will save about €25m annually, though it expects to incur cash and non-cash impairment charges of €45m to €55m and around €90m, respectively. Revenue from IT services is expected to decline €20m annually will become immaterial by 2018, it said.

“The fundamentals of our core network services and voice services businesses remain solid, and we are driving improvements in our datacentre services business. We are taking decisive action to become a more focused and disciplined organisation which we believe will accelerate the performance of our Core Business,” said Rakesh Bhasin, Colt chief executive.

“Overall, we believe the prospects for the Group are good and I am confident that, with the recent changes we have made within the senior management team, we will be able to deliver improved profitability and cash returns,” he added.

Colt still owns and will continue to operate its 22 carrier neutral datacentres in Europe and 7 in the Asia Pacific region (including those acquired through Japanese IT services provider KVH last year), though its goal of moving away from IT services may also mean a pivot towards becoming more of a systems integrator, which – like the IT services market – is quite competitive, and it isn’t entirely clear how the company intends to differentiate from other large incumbents in this space.

citizens bank, Enterprise IT, IBM, Ken Starkey, Managed services, News & Analysis, Philip Guido

Citizens Bank signs 5-year managed services deal with IBM

Citizens Bank has tapped IBM for a managed services deal

Citizens Bank has tapped IBM in a managed services deal

Citizens Bank is moving its back-end technology infrastructure to a managed services environment following the signing of  a five-year IT services agreement with IBM.

Using a hybrid IT approach, IBM will optimise the bank’s existing IT infrastructure by integrating automation and predictive analytics technologies to standardise and streamline many of its internal IT systems and processes, including core banking applications, branch operations and online and mobile banking.

“Information technology plays a key role in our ability to anticipate and meet the needs of every customer, across every channel,” said Ken Starkey, chief technology officer, infrastructure services, Citizens Bank. “This agreement with IBM will provide immediate access to new technologies and capabilities, enabling us to create greater efficiencies in support of Citizens’ growth objectives.”

Under the contract, IBM will operate Citizens’ existing and future IT systems located in the bank’s data centres in Rhode Island and North Carolina. The bank already uses IBM systems and technologies. IBM also will support Citizens’ voice and data networks and provide IT support for all Citizens colleagues.

Philip Guido, general manager, IBM Global Technology Services, North America, said: “This is part of a multi-stage transformation of Citizen’s IT environment that lays the foundation for integrating additional IBM solutions in the future, making the bank more agile and responsive to the growing needs of its customers.”

Cisco, Day1, Funding, Grand View Research, Infrastructure as a Service, InterCloud, Logic Method IT, Luis Benavides, Managed services, NetApp, News & Analysis

Cloud service integrator Day1 secures $2m

Day1 offers cloud system integration services

Day1 offers cloud system integration services

Cloud services integrator and provider Day1 Solutions has closed a $2m funding round the company said will be used to expand its technical services and sales team.

Day1 was founded in 2012 and provides NetApp cloud storage and Cisco Intercloud-based services to a range of public and private sector clients, and offers system integration services for clients deploying cloud services on Amazon’s cloud infrastructure.

It also offers a white label managed services platform to MSPs, an offering that grew out of its acquisition of Logic Method IT (LMIT) in November last year.

“Day1 Solutions is on a hyper-growth trajectory, and last year experienced a year-over-year revenue increase in excess of 1600 percent,” said Luis Benavides, founder and chief executive officer of Day1 Solutions.

“This funding is a testament to our investors’ confidence in Day1 Solutions’ leadership team, business model and ability to consistently deliver an exceptional cloud experience to a rapidly growing base of enterprise customers moving mission critical IT operations to the cloud.”

Day1’s specialisation is largely in the service integration piece, and many analyst houses expect cloud system integration to play an increasingly prominent role – particularly in the infrastructure integration segment – as enterprises increasingly hybridise their IT landscapes with a mix of multi-cloud, cloud and on-premise systems.

According to Grand View Research the global system integration market is expected to reach $393bn by 2020, with infrastructure integration accounting for about 35 per cent of that market.

Desktone, Desktop virtualization, Managed services, Partnerships, Total Cost of Ownership, Virtual desktop, Virtualization

Quest, Pivotal Technologies Partner to Deliver Desktops as a Cloud Service

Desktone, Inc., today announced a partnership between Quest, a cloud service provider, and Pivotal Technologies Group, a managed service provider. Based on the relationship, Pivotal will now offer Desktone-powered hosted Windows desktops provided by Quest as a managed service to businesses. The relationship represents an effective new way for service providers of all sizes to benefit from increasing demand for desktops as a cloud service. By providing the Desktone-powered DaaS offering to channel partners, Quest is able to expand their market opportunity while enabling managed service providers such as Pivotal the ability to offer virtual desktops without having to invest in costly infrastructure.

“We built the Desktone Platform from day one for service providers like Quest and Pivotal that are tasked with helping end user organizations increase IT efficiencies while keeping their budgets in check,” said David Grant, Vice President of Strategy, Desktone. “We have seen an explosion of interest from managed service providers (MSPs) that want to deliver DaaS but cannot build their own data centers. With DaaS, Quest is able to host and deploy virtual desktops from their data centers, making it easy for Pivotal to provision new desktops for end users whenever they’re needed without investing in costly hardware and software.”

“Quest is committed to its partners to capitalize on cloud computing opportunities like DaaS that are in the greatest demand among customers today,” said Adam Burke, Director of Quest’s Technology Partner Program. “Our partnership with Pivotal is a testament to the unique value proposition that Quest delivers as a partner of choice to accelerate their time to market and provide the greatest value of cloud services to their end customers.”

Small and mid-sized service providers often don’t have the capacity for hosted offerings. By leveraging Desktone’s multi-tenant DaaS solution, Quest can provide MSPs like Pivotal a simple, affordable way to offer virtual desktops to end user organizations. The multi-tenant architecture makes it easy to deliver secure, scalable virtual desktops as a cloud service without the expense and hassle of infrastructure integration and maintenance.

“Our customers look to Pivotal to solve their IT pain points. One of the biggest challenges we see is organizations looking to support mobile and remote workers,” said Jim Law, President, Pivotal Technologies Group. “We previously offered our customers desktops from a traditional VDI provider but found the service expensive and difficult to manage because of issues with speed and availability. By transitioning to the Quest DaaS model powered by Desktone we are able to streamline desktop management and improve reliability while reducing the price per desktop by half.”


AppNeta, Managed services, Network performance, Partnerships, PathView Cloud

AppNeta Launches Global MSP Partner Program

AppNeta today announced the launch of a new partner program for Managed Service Providers (MSPs). The AppNeta MSP Partner Program is designed to offer easy, revenue-generating services for assuring performance of critical applications such as VoIP, video conferencing, virtualization and web-based services. Today, AppNeta’s MSP Partners seamlessly and easily integrate AppNeta services into existing managed service contracts and create enhanced service offerings including network assessments, continuous monitoring, proactive troubleshooting, and scheduled reporting and alerting.

AppNeta’s PathView Cloud network performance service provides channel partners with unmatched breadth of insight and time to value, enabling them to see across multiple customer infrastructures in one view, and then pinpoint exactly where problems are occurring and why. The new MSP Partner Program offers unique pricing terms, centralized dashboards and alerts, white-labeled custom branded interface and a utility-based MRR billing model.

“We understand the demands on customer networks today, especially as business applications become more performance-sensitive. It is absolutely necessary for MSPs to have 24/7 performance visibility,” said Jim Melvin, CEO of AppNeta. “AppNeta is partnering with MSPs to develop an easy-to-implement service assurance program that will not only improve customer satisfaction, but will create new revenue sources at the same time.”

“Bandwidth Management Group is thrilled to be part of the AppNeta MSP Partner Program. We can now measure the performance of our customers’ wide area networks and cloud applications with continuous remote site monitoring,” said Christian Fedor, president, Bandwidth Management Group. “The new billing and training programs have made it easy for us to integrate the AppNeta solution into our existing managed service portfolio.”

While AppNeta has a long-standing partner program with more than 400 partners around the world, the new MSP Program is enhanced with key benefits to partners managing ongoing services and delivering critical applications to their global customer sites. The AppNeta MSP Partner program features:

  • Monthly, consumption-based billing
  • Easy, cloud-delivered implementation and automatic service upgrades
  • Simple, straightforward licensing
  • Regular upsell opportunities to customers