Anthony Green, sales and marketing director at Blue Chip explains the significance of investing in building Cloud offerings to add alongside its existing services portfolio: “‘Infrastructure as a Service’ (IaaS) provides our customers with the latest generation of virtualised infrastructure, hosted in a secure, resilient facility whilst negating the long term costs associated with running, maintaining and replacing on premise hardware and IT Infrastructure and the need for virtualisation and storage skills in-house . We make the investment and our customers get the benefits instantly without the usual up-front Capex expense.
“The argument for the Cloud has already been proven through reducing overall costs whilst increasing performance and productivity, which is why so many customers have already started migrating. The decision on which partner to work with must not be taken lightly, think about financial stability, technical capability and check they have a proven track record of delivering Cloud Services.”
By partnering with leading UK data centre specialist, C4L, to provide Co-location services for both its own platform and its customer’s equipment, Blue Chip provides customers with a guaranteed, secure, robust service with connection to multiple datacentres giving improved Disaster Recovery, all connected by a private Terabit network. The securely housed facility has uninterruptable power supplies (UPS) with backup diesel generators, Finger Print access and 24/7 CCTV.
It is a unique step for Blue Chip, as a leading provider of IT solutions, to invest in its own Cloud platform rather than just adding a margin to someone elses infrastructure service. Blue Chip has built an extensive virtualised infrastructure using advanced technologies from Tier 1 vendors, including EMC, VMware, Microsoft and Cisco, to provide a cutting-edge infrastructure platform to our customers. An important part of this investment is the secondary datacentre facility situated at Blue Chip’s headquarters in Poole. Our platform allows customers of any size from SME to Enterprise to benefit from Enterprise Class Infrastructure technology, whether they require a single server or an entire suite of servers.
Green adds, “By combining our expertise with a dual location datacentre facility, our customers have the enhanced offering of end-to-end IT consultation, implementation, infrastructure platform and 24 x 7 support and monitoring under one roof.”
Green continues: “Flexibility is also particularly relevant in the economic environment we live in today. Our customers all buy into the fact that they are able to quickly scale up, or down, their IT Infrastructure to meet the changing needs of their business. A number of customers have already added users, sites and new applications to their environments both quickly and cheaply. This flexibility also means any customer who needs to re-structure the size or shape of their business down the line can adjust their IT cost instantly, this has always been a limitation with physical IT Infrastructure investments.”
For many businesses, Cloud Computing is still very much an enigma. In order to dispel the myths and fully explain it in plain speaking terms, Blue Chip is bringing together its own expertise of migrating SME and enterprise customers to the Cloud, alongside authorities from Microsoft, EVault, Symantec.Cloud and Wyse for a series of free of charge road shows across the country.