Making the move into cloud services

Having started out in 1992 as a pure-play IT reseller, Brisbane-based SureBridge IT has diversified its business to develop its own cloud services platform, largely on the back of demand from its customer base.

“Some of our clients wanted us to provide either on-site or hosted services,” said SureBridge IT Managing Director and CEO Rick Brown. “The cloud is certainly getting an accelerated degree of attention and a lot more acceptance. We typically found that during the course of discussion with our customers that if we offered cloud services, the CEO would be supportive of it, provided it was not for core services and it did not cost more than what they were already doing.”

Data management scenarios vary from one customer to another, which is where SureBridge IT comes into its own as it can tailor its offering to meet individual customers’ needs.

To ensure its ability to deliver optimised, individualised services to customer infrastructures, SureBridge IT turned to a converged cloud solution from Hitachi Data Systems (HDS), which comprises a Hitachi Compute Blade 500 (CB 500) chassis, fully populated and supported by Hitachi Unified Storage 130.

“We can get far more virtual servers inside the CB 500s than we can on anyone else’s platform,” said Brown. “We also got excellent performance, tremendous throughput, a lot more compaction of virtual servers on the HDS infrastructure, and it’s also the most reliable in the world.”

Another key benefit of the HDS partnership is the pay-as-you-use pricing model, which involves no upfront costs for SureBridge IT’s customers. “HDS offers its hardware platform as a service to us and we pay according to our customer usage. We have a multitiered storage platform and a compute platform which our customers consume, and we are then billed by HDS for that usage on a monthly basis,” said Brown.

HDS has enabled SureBridge IT to enter the cloud services market and make a significant impact in the space. SureBridge IT’s customers can now outsource all of their cloud services to the company, with the resilience, reliability and density of a cloud platform supporting them.

SureBridge IT has experienced 15% growth in its business over the past 12 months as a direct result of adding cloud solutions to its services portfolio. After little more than a year, around 40% of SureBridge IT’s business is now services based. These offerings will soon be the largest proportion of the business, with infrastructure-as-a-service and ‘talent on demand’ completing the suite of offerings.

“The services arm is growing rapidly, but we will always have an infrastructure component as not everyone will want to use the cloud. But this will soon be a very small proportion of our overall business, with cloud services continuing to ramp up dramatically,” said Brown.

“Anyone in our field who doesn’t offer managed services and cloud service these days won’t be around for long unless they have a particular niche they operate in. It is absolutely the way of the future, and the future is here,” he said.