In November last year, VMware, Cisco and EMC^2 launched the VCE (Virtual Computing Environment) coalition in the US to support customers' needs in the areas of virtualisation and private cloud computing.
These major international vendors are key technology partners for Business Connexion in this market, which is rapidly expanding in South Africa. Now VCE is here.
The upcoming VCE launch shows Business Connexion's long standing partnerships with these other companies, further enhancing its solutions delivery for its customers.
The VCE initiative is aimed at providing new or existing customers in these areas with building blocks - Vblock Infrastructure Packages - for new solutions. This simplifies and accelerates the process for customers deploying virtualisation and cloud computing solutions.
“Virtualisation is a primary focus for companies of all sizes in almost every market sector,” says Andy Brauer, CTO at Business Connexion. “We have been active in this area since the beginning and have a relationship with the three other companies in the VCE coalition dating back to those early days.
“What we see now, with the availability of mature, end-to-end virtualisation solutions and the rapidly increasing adoption of cloud computing models, is enormous demand from customers for new solutions that really deliver value.”
The advantages of basic virtualisation are primarily savings on costs, in terms of both capital expenditure and operations. The ability to get software, storage and platforms delivered as a service - often outsourced - makes a company truly Web-enabled.
According to John Jenkins, Business Connexion's Service Group chief executive, cloud computing delivers real savings and the agility to scale up or down as business needs dictate.
“With almost anything delivered as a service, the capital expenses, development time and staff overhead of deploying new solutions is greatly reduced,” says Jenkins.
Business Connexion is the only African company to provide cloud services on Vblock - this offers the company's customers their own internal cloud and the ability to extend private clouds to the Business Connexion cloud. This is achieved through the company's Tier IV data centre operating as an external cloud and thereby creating a high availability/disaster recovery scenario.
“Prior to the formation of the VCE coalition, Business Connexion designed a version of the VCE Vblock based on a combination of Cisco, EMC, VMWare and other technologies. The demand for virtualisation, outsourced solutions, anything as a service (XaaS) and cloud computing has ramped up to the point where we needed to establish a formal partnership. The new platform delivers better value, better accountability and reliability for all our customers,” adds Jenkins.
He says Business Connexion foresees a smooth migration to the new platform, which adds the benefit of reduced operational costs and faster implementation.
Brauer concludes: “In a nutshell, VCE will deliver the latest, leading technology to support solutions based on Business Connexion's experience and expertise in conjunction with the skills and support of our partners.”
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