11:11 Systems > Case Studies > Moving to iland Cloud, now 11:11 Systems Cloud, results in significant cost savings.

Moving to iland Cloud, now 11:11 Systems Cloud, results in significant cost savings.

Customer Company Size

SME

Region

Europe

Country

United Kingdom

Product

11:11 Cloud (IaaS)

Tech Stack

VMware
vCloud Director

Implementation Scale

Enterprise-wide Deployment

Impact Metrics

Cost Savings

Technology Category

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Computing

Applicable Industries

Telecommunications

Applicable Functions

Business Operation

Services

Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services

About The Customer

Prolateral Consulting is a company headquartered in Luton, Bedfordshire in the UK. The company provides hosted IT services in the areas of web applications and hosting, email messaging security, and management. Prolateral’s customer base spans all industry sectors and ranges in size from SMEs to large corporations. The company started in 2003 but began to grow significantly from 2008 with the provision of an email/messaging solution focused on good message delivery using trusted outbound SMTP smarthost; inbound mail services with a hosted spam filtering solution; mail backup services; and primary and secondary DNS services. Over the years Prolateral has consistently grown its revenue. Prolateral is the only UK company to offer outMail, its secure and safe SMTP SmartHost and Mail Relay service that allows customers to send emails from any SMTP aware mail client, server, and mobile device. Although it has customers around the world, the majority are based in the UK.

The Challenge

Prolateral Consulting, a UK-based company providing hosted IT services, was experiencing rapid growth. This growth led to an increase in costs, particularly for purchasing more hardware. The company had racks of equipment in co-location sites in the UK and Germany. However, as the company grew, it needed additional sites in Europe and the USA, which meant the capital cost of equipment, maintenance, and local support services would all increase drastically. The company was reaching its capacity as a co-location and had to add expensive hardware. This, coupled with the poor state of both the UK and global economies in 2010, resulted in cost reduction becoming a priority for the company.

The Solution

Prolateral decided to migrate from a hardware/co-location model to a cloud services model. The company initially built a cloud environment in-house for testing purposes and after a few months of testing internally, were one of the first UK customers to go live with a production system in [11:11]’s London data center. [11:11] Support helped Prolateral move all its VMs from its own ESX servers and ensure they were all working correctly in the [11:11] data center. Prolateral currently has an internal cloud running a network monitoring solution that monitors all the company’s systems globally across multi-clouds and suppliers. In addition, its internal cloud hosts all local-based servers for day-to-day needs. Prolateral’s external clouds host all the servers running the company’s core products and services for end users/customers and its partner/reseller base.

Operational Impact

Prolateral was able to increase capacity in minutes rather than days or weeks simply by cloning a virtual machine.
The company was able to realize exponential savings over the last few years and a plan to consolidate all its cloud environments to one [11:11] cloud.
By 2015, the aim is to be completely cloud-based with no co-location sites.

Quantitative Benefit

ROI of over 20% budget savings
30% savings the following year as the company slowly migrated from co-location to cloud
38% budget savings in 2012
The expected total saving is likely to be almost 50% as there will be no more co-location rental costs, no more hardware maintenance costs, and no more costly local support staff costs.