IT Services
With over 30 years’ experience selling and supporting enterprise IT, Netherlands based Telindus was keenly aware of the impact the Cloud was having on its market. It was also keen to take advantage of the trend, by diversifying into expert services to help customers integrate, manage and get the most from their Cloud investments. Developing tools to support these services themselves, however, would be a considerable undertaking and the company was keen to shortcut the process by exploiting existing products and services wherever possible. Starting with Xi Beam, which provides the motive force behind Cloud Insight as a Service, the first member of a growing Telindus IT as a Service family.
Rather than just another complex tool in an already crowded market, we wanted to give customers peace of mind through simple guarantees that their Cloud investments were as secure and cost effective as possible. Beam enables us to do just that by providing the ready made technology we needed to deliver our expert-led Cloud Insight as a Service offering.
When Telindus decided to bring a new portfolio of IT as a Service products to market it faced two challenges. The first was differentiating its services in a rapidly evolving and hugely competitive marketplace. The second was working out how best to get reliable and effective services to market both quickly and affordably.
Fortunately, as an existing Nutanix partner the company was well placed to understand customer Cloud issues and the kind of analytical help they needed when it came to resolving them, as Jos Vulto, Telindus Solutions Architect explains.
“We realised we needed to add extra value beyond simply making tools and technologies available as services. Not least because most of our customers would be smaller companies with limited availability of technical skills, looking not for yet more technology but insight and expert advice regarding their Cloud investments. Access to that expert knowledge and an outcome guarantee was the extra value we decided to add to differentiate our services.”
That still left the matter of how to deliver the services. In-house development from scratch was out of the question - it would cost too much and take too long – so the company turned to Nutanix, and Xi Beam in particular, to provide the technology and tooling
Xi Beam from Nutanix is a SaaS (Software as a Service) solution that provides deep visibility into Cloud consumption patterns, employing machine intelligence to both optimise compliance measures and maximise cost efficiency. More than that, it allows operators to fix security vulnerabilities and right-size Cloud resources with just one-click as well as create automated policies to continuously monitor and maintain high levels of compliance and efficiency.
Leveraging its comprehensive machine learning capabilities, Xi Beam is at the heart of the Telindus service, however, the end customer never directly sees or uses the Beam software themselves - it’s all done for them.
Cloud Insight as a Service customers simply sign up to a monthly Netflix-like subscription service; provide read-access to their Cloud services (either on AWS or Microsoft Azure) and leave the scanning, analysis and interpretation to Telindus. In return they get their own personal “Cloud expert” able to discuss what Beam finds, make recommendations to improve matters and accompany the customer to put the necessary remediation in place.
Importantly, Xi Beam enables Telindus to guarantee its ability to optimize a customer’s cloud to be both structurally at least 90% compliant with security governance requirements and 95% cost efficient. The provider is also very open when it comes to the role of the Beam software as the basis of the service it provides.
“We know that customers could, of course, run Beam themselves,” commented Vulto, “but most don’t have the cloud skills and this way they don’t have to. We add that value, and guarantee the results. In effect it’s not technology we’re offering, but peace of mind. And it’s Beam which gives us the confidence to do that.”
Because it takes time to perform the analyses, make changes and do further scans to check on progress, customers are asked to sign up for a minimum of three months. During that period they get weekly access to their Cloud expert, by phone and email. They also receive personalised management reports generated by the Telindus Service which communicates with Beam via API calls.
The results can be impressive, as Ruud Oude Maatman, Telindus Product Lead explains.
“Customers tend to start out around 45-50% compliant, meaning they fail around half the comprehensive compliance checks made by the Beam software. Working with the customer we can get that up and deliver on the 90% guarantee well within the first three months. It’s the same, too, for cost efficiency. And if we fall below the guarantees on either count we’ll lower the subscription rate until they’re back on track.”
Telindus Cloud Insight as a Service benefits from ongoing development of the Beam software which is continuously extended and enhanced. Multi-cloud optimisation across different vendor platforms is a major focus of that development and something Telindus sees as important when it comes to extending its product.
“Customers in the Netherlands tend to stick with just one Cloud vendor at present,” commented Vulto, “however, that is changing and we look forward to gaining the ability to identify cross-platform security and cost optimizations then automate remediation across clouds, features that we know are on the Beam roadmap.”
Beyond that the company is also looking to extend its IT as a Service portfolio and is evaluating other Nutanixproducts as a means of providing the necessary tooling.