Wednesday, December 7, 2011

Changing the Way Managed Services are Delivered

by Abiquo Inc.

Cloud computing creates a range of revenue opportunities for service
providers, from selling resources to managing complex environments.

Company Profile
Since 1997, CARI.net has been providing services, managing back end infrastructures
and enabling its customers for success. With roots as a hosting provider, CARI.net has
grown to providing automated provisioning, flexible configurations, around the clock
certified system support and has expanded its hosting options to include dedicated
servers, server clusters, and public and private cloud offerings. CARI.net pushes the
envelope on performance, often using the latest technologies available to ensure that it
provides dependable and reliable services for their clients’ mission critical computing and
storage platforms. Currently, CARI.net has over 8000 customers in over 150 countries.

The Challenge
The 2008 economic downturn caused businesses to evaluate and make across the board
cuts to various departments. For many enterprises, IT infrastructure operations was
targeted for cuts, leading them to outsource their IT resources to hosted cloud offerings
and/or downsize their overall resources.

As Mike Carpenter of CARI.net explained, “No matter what size company – large-scale
enterprises or small-to-medium businesses, the problem that caught CARI.net’s
attention was that cutting IT costs is important to everyone.” While CARI.net continued
to gain new customers, overall their deployments were smaller and often had shorter
term commitments.

Their customers wanted to right-size their resources; to just spin up the exact amount
they need and then shut the resource down when it is no longer needed. “Without
automation and self-service, this process could take days to weeks depending on the size
of a project, the scope of work and the business policies in place at an organization,”
says Carpenter. CARI.net had spent ten years building automation into their hosted
environments, but did not have a self-service portal for provisioning servers, networks,
or external storage.

Choosing Abiquo
CARI.net chose the Abiquo cloud management platform for its ability to accommodate
the diverse infrastructure needs of its global client base. These needs included: being
hypervisor agnostic, suitable for multiple platforms, and multi-tenant, and which could
work with a variety of different storage area network devices, as well as having a
wide-open API.

“Without the ability to tie directly into our panel we would have had to start from scratch
as a company. We knew instantly that Abiquo’s solution could meet our needs as well as
those of our clients.,” said Carpenter. “If the cloud platform that we selected didn’t have
an open API we couldn’t tie our system into it and we would have lost an investment that
we made over the course of fourteen years. So that open API was critical.”

CARI.net spent several months evaluating the available cloud solutions and ran them
through the paces. “One of the things that I noticed about Abiquo right away that just blew
me away, was how easy it was to use. I’m the business end of things. I am not a system
administrator. I logged into Abiquo and with just moving around pointing and clicking I
was able to use it. It required no training at all. I was using it in no time. It was almost too
easy,” Carpenter noted. “I had had experience with other cloud computing solutions and
you had to have hours of training or even a certification to use a system. That’s not going
to work for most companies.”

CARI.net’s New Hosted Cloud Offering
CARI.net’s cloud services line diversifies the total company offering, which extends to each
of their customers’ clients. They host the resources, and their customers can provide
value-add services to that hosted resource.

CARI.net gains visibility, control, and more robust automation, and their customers are
empowered to manage their own resources. Carpenter notes that the cloud services
model eliminates many of the old challenges of IT, especially around capacity planning.
“They can use what they need and as soon as a project is done they can scale down, put
the project on hold for later use or wrap it up d they’re done. There is no cost outlay for
a capital expense on hardware or long-term contracts, all the things that made IT tough
for the past thirty years are gone. Cloud computing has eliminated this.”

One of the biggest measurements of success for CARI.net is their client’s happiness.
“Recently we had a customer use the self-service portal to move their client’s application
from another hosting provider into one hosted by CARI.net in only a matter of hours.
Typically that would take days to do, but since they were able to do it so quickly using
Abiquo, they came out as super heroes to their client,” said Carpenter. ”It’s really exciting
to see a customer get that kind of efficiency. It's a win – win – win situation.” The less
time, and therefore resources, a company has to spend on developing a project means
that company can spend developing new opportunities.

Since 2008 when the economy turned, CARI.net has seen many of its customers struggle.
Carpenter noted, “Many companies have run into hard times, and this means being more
efficient. With Abiquo’s cloud management platform – having the flexibility to only use the
services and resources they need has literally saved a lot of companies. This tough
economy has been hard on people but companies and platforms like Abiquo have been
pivotal in helping to facilitate new growth.”





CARI.net provides every kind of managed hosting that you might need, from dedicated servers, to server clusters (or farms), to public, private and hybrid cloud computing. Call CARI.net to see what we can do for you.
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