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Profile
Midpoint AB is a leading hosted services provider based in Karlstad, Sweden. Founded in 2006, the company has expertise in cloud-based service offerings. It offers value-added services that are tailored to meet its customers’ needs, with high-availability cloud solutions as the basic platform.
Issue
Previously, Midpoint offered only hosted messaging services to its customers. These services were hosted on an external provider’s cloud infrastructure. This meant that the company had little control over the quality of service. Midpoint’s older services were losing steam, and it needed to launch a new set of services that would offer higher value to the company as well as its customers. The company wanted to increase its footprint and expand its range of offerings.
In order to do this, Midpoint needed to get better control over its infrastructure, and be able to leverage this infrastructure to capture more market share. The company wanted to reduce liability, become future-ready, and have the opportunity to grow along with growing market needs. To do all this, Midpoint opted to invest in its own cloud infrastructure.
Challenges
Issues with performance, availability: As Midpoint had its services running on an external vendor’s infrastructure, it had no control over the quality of service. If there were issues with performance or availability, Midpoint had no visibility into these issues, and was forced to rely on the vendor to address them. This translated into higher business risk.
Limited ability to add new services: The company wanted to offer new and customized services to its customers, but could not do so as it did not own the infrastructure. This meant lost business opportunities.
Long time-to-market: Midpoint was dependent on its vendor to be able to meet its customers’ needs. Therefore, time-to-market for existing services was longer.
Limitations in scalability: Not having its own infrastructure also made it difficult to scale. Midpoint depended on its cloud vendor to add scale, or enable the deployment model that the business called for.
Old technology: With time, the services that Midpoint was offering were losing relevance. The company offered Hosted Exchange and Hosted SharePoint. Income from these services was dropping, and Midpoint needed to bring in new services that would provide higher value, as well as technology that was at the beginning of its lifecycle.
Why Progression
Progression approached Midpoint through one of its partners in Europe, ICCM Solutions. Midpoint was looking for a systems integrator with a good understanding of its business. Midpoint also wanted a systems integrator with a proven understanding of the vCloud Director offering. Progression had all of the above, along with a history of successful implementations. With its deep and wide-ranging technology expertise, Progression held detailed consultative discussions with Midpoint to understand its requirements as well as its IT environment. Then, Progression offered a well architected solution that met all of Midpoint’s needs, and was priced competitively.
Solution
Midpoint had an existing user agreement with VMware, and wanted to implement VMware’s vSphere for virtualization, as well as VMware’s vCloud Director for the management and provisioning of infrastructure. Progression implemented the solution in June 2012, in line with VMware best practices. The Progression project team first implemented VMware’s vSphere as the virtualization platform, and then built the services stack by implementing vCloud Director. This was done remotely, with the implementation team working from Progression’s office in India. The implementation was done over a month. And thanks to Progression’s extensive planning, which ensured that all essential pieces—like connectivity, resource availability, and communication across all parties—were in place from the start, the team faced no major challenges and the deployment was extremely smooth.
Benefits
Risk mitigation: Since Midpoint now has complete control over its IT infrastructure, it now faces considerably lower business risk.
Ability to offer new services, customized solutions: Midpoint now offers several new services, including Virtual Datacenter as a Service, general managed server hosting, and hybrid cloud deployments with vCloud Connector. In addition, vCloud Director enables Midpoint to create customer-specific solutions quickly and easily. The company can now meet its customers’ needs completely.
Reduced time-to-market: Post implementation, time-to-market is significantly reduced. The company can now respond rapidly to market demands.
Improved ROI: Having its own cloud infrastructure has allowed Midpoint to benefit from higher margins and become more profitable.
Scalability: Midpoint can now easily add more servers whenever it needs to, without any negative impact on its existing services.
Negligible downtime: Since the launch of the new services, Midpoint has seen a total downtime of six minutes—and even that was related to human error.
Satisfied customers: Post-implementation, the company can respond immediately to any problems, instead of having to wait for the vendor to address issues.
