The Challenge
“The launch of Amsio Cloud is a critical strategic development for our company and Interxion has been there every step of the way,” says Ruben van der Zwan, Amsio’s chief technology officer.
Why is this move so significant for Amsio? An important part of the company’s customer base comprises IT consultants and system integrators (SIs) who partner with Amsio to deliver IT solutions to businesses. These IT specialists see as clearly as Amsio does that the future of IT delivery, for businesses large and small, lies in hybrid clouds: a seamless mix of private and public cloud services. But many of them don’t have the resources to build and manage private cloud platforms themselves; that’s just not their business. Fortunately it is Amsio’s.
Netherlands-based Amsio has been providing both managed and unmanaged hosting platforms and services for more than 10 years. Through Amsio Cloud it’s taking the business into the future, providing a vital missing ingredient for those looking to offer hybrid cloud solutions: a secure, ready-made, managed private cloud environment built on the same technology as Microsoft’s public Windows Azure platform.
Interxion really stood out for their understanding of our target business model and the flexibility to make it a reality.
Ruben van der Zwan CTO, Amsio
The Solution
Amsio Cloud is offered as a ‘white label’ private cloud platform with all the flexibility you’d expect from a proper cloud platform. Customers can provision and remove virtual private servers (VPSs) instantly through a self-service portal. Billing is usage-based and metered daily, with no minimum commitment or price penalties for low usage. Amsio can offer this flexibility at a competitive price because its cutting-edge Cloud OS platform can scale to very high densities and is ultra-efficient in assigning and releasing pooled resources. But the competitiveness of its commercial offering depends on receiving the same technical and commercial flexibility from Interxion.
“We considered several carrier-neutral data centres,” says van der Zwan. “Interxion really stood out for their understanding of our target business model and the flexibility to make it a reality. We don’t have to make specific commitments: when we need more power to scale our server densities, we get it; when we don’t need it we don’t pay for it.”
Amsio, their partners and customers come together in Interxion’s Amsterdam data centre to create services that combine everyone’s expertise and resources in the most efficient way. The Interxion Cloud Hub is where cloud infrastructure and platform providers such as Amsio connect with a choice of carriers, storage providers, software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers, SIs and other IT service providers — both as a community and, where relevant, through cross connects.
“To build a successful cloud service you need a scalable high-density environment, of the highest quality and reliability, with great connectivity and reach. That’s exactly what the Interxion Cloud Hub delivers,” says van der Zwan.
“You can tell the minute you walk in that the Interxion team knows what its doing. This is data-centre best practice in action,” he sums up.
Amsio has been running hosting services from Interxion’s cloud hub for more than four years, although originally under the name of Argeweb. The Amsio brand was created when Argeweb realised that it was running two quite different businesses, each of which needed its own identity and strategic direction. Argeweb retains the group’s domain registration and consumer web-hosting business. New sister company Amsio focuses on more complex web and business hosting needs.
The development of Amsio Cloud is the first move signalling the company’s focus and intent, and Interxion has played a key role by partnering with Amsio to launch www.testthecloud.nl, which lets companies test the Amsio Cloud service for free for three months.
“It’s typical of the value Interxion delivers,” says van der Zwan. “They’re genuinely interested in our business and generous with advice and resources. With Interxion as our partner, we’re confident about the future.”
This future includes a plan to launch a SaaS platform on Amsio Cloud to deliver managed Exchange, Lync and other Microsoft applications as private cloud services, as well as continuing development of the Amsio Cloud platform in close collaboration with Microsoft.