Morpheus Data > Case Studies > Transforming delivery services with next-gen hybrid cloud management and self-service

Transforming delivery services with next-gen hybrid cloud management and self-service

Customer Company Size

SME

Region

Europe

Country

Finland

Product

Morpheus hybrid cloud management platform
Ficolo cloud delivery services

Tech Stack

Docker
KVM
Nutanix Acropolis
OpenStack
Oracle VM
VMware vCloud Director
VMware vSphere
Xen Server
AWS
Azure
Oracle
UpCloud
HPE
Dell
VMware NSX
Ansible
Bash
Microsoft PowerShell
Avamar
Veeam

Implementation Scale

Enterprise-wide Deployment

Impact Metrics

Cost Savings
Customer Satisfaction
Productivity Improvements

Technology Category

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Computing
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Hybrid Cloud
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Private Cloud
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Public Cloud

Applicable Industries

Telecommunications

Applicable Functions

Business Operation

Services

Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
System Integration

About The Customer

Founded in 2011, Ficolo Ltd. is a data center and cloud delivery company specializing in cloud delivery services. The company utilizes its state-of-the-art facilities, secure connectivity, and hybrid cloud management platform to combine the best of private and public cloud. Ficolo helps IT providers and software companies transform into cloud-based business models leveraging innovative managed services. With a tagline proclaiming, “We engineer cloud solutions,” the company offers all the components required to provide global cloud services—from colocation space to connectivity and security. In addition to local IT and software companies, Ficolo’s portfolio caters to the needs of international high-performance computing and hyperscale customers looking to benefit from the cool Nordic climate, abundance of green energy, and affordable power price.

The Challenge

Ficolo, a data center and cloud delivery company, was facing competitive pressure to transform itself into a cloud player. The company wanted to offer wholesale hybrid cloud services to its customers, rather than simply providing commodity public cloud services. However, Ficolo was challenged to find the right approach to management and automation. The goal was to provide a semi-public shared cloud solution to multiple private cloud customers who were also using public cloud. At the same time, the team also saw the chance to help software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers develop and host their applications. For these customers, Ficolo had to not only provide multi-cloud management, it also needed a highly automated provisioning engine to improve the velocity of client software releases.

The Solution

Ficolo embarked on a six-month evaluation process of multiple cloud management and automation platforms. When the Ficolo team found Morpheus, it quickly proved to be the right fit for their wholesale multitenant strategy and automated provisioning needs. The Ficolo team saw that Morpheus was a compliant, proven product that came ready to work in business-critical environments. They also appreciated that Morpheus is truly agnostic and did not require changes to underlying hypervisors and hardware. This meant that with Morpheus, unlike with some of the other platforms investigated, there was no need to start the implementation from scratch. The new Morpheus hybrid cloud management platform integrated well with existing private cloud environments with no impact to any functionality. It also ran easily in parallel with existing tools. Ficolo was happy that the Morpheus platform proved to be flexible by design, expanding easily from single-node to larger scale-out deployments. In that way, the platform could readily meet the needs of Ficolo’s customers, whose cloud environments range from simple and stable to more dynamic and complex. The initial rollout was fast and completed in a matter of days. Some more advanced aspects of the implementation took a bit more time. However, Ficolo found that the Morpheus engineering team always listened and stayed focused on reaching resolutions for both Ficolo and its customer. The close partnership between vendor and service provider has made this a successful long-term relationship.

Operational Impact

Ficolo can set up cloud capacity for new customers extremely quickly. That includes spinning up Morpheus as well as virtual servers on the front and back end, hardening, monitoring, backup, and all the other components in the full technology stack.
In addition to speed, Morpheus has improved the operational efficiency of both Ficolo and its customers. The service catalog and automation provided by Morpheus and Ficolo enables a true hybrid cloud experience, including an elastic approach to scaling. Customers don’t need to acquire and setup capacity in advance. They get what they need, when they need it.
One particular use case highlights how Morpheus hybrid cloud management enables flexible expansion of resources during mergers and acquisitions. Recently, a Ficolo customer faced such a challenge with a new acquisition. With Morpheus, Ficolo was able to provide a single control plane into existing applications and integrate the workloads and tools of the new company—without having to wait for a full migration or netnew deployment. The result was a much faster path to value from the combined entity.
Another use case takes into consideration the fact that many companies that were completely outsourcing IT ten or 15 years ago are now starting to bring things back in house as they move to the cloud. The simplicity Morpheus brings to provisioning and day-two management has enabled Ficolo customers to embrace self-service IT and minimize or eliminate outsourcing costs. The result is more freedom for those customers to invest in shared hybrid services from Ficolo.