For businesses entering the public cloud market, finding the software and partners that enable rapid deployment for their customers can be a major obstacle. It can take up a significant amount of time and result in a low ROI if the wrong choices are made when providing public and private cloud solutions.
Fortunately, France-based DIMSI, did not fall into this trap. For more than 15 years they have been designing and implementing innovative solutions for their customers. Already delivering Microsoft Dynamics365, consulting and infrastructure solutions, and with offices in France, Tunisia and Hong Kong, they wanted to enlarge their offerings to their customers by delivering easy-to-deploy public cloud solutions.
DIMSI chose Apache CloudStack due to its ease of implementation and thus giving them the ability to ‘support customers more efficiently. DIMSI decided to work with ShapeBlue so they can access ‘high-level support promptly, whenever it is needed’.
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We decided that Apache CloudStack was the best solution for a number of factors. Firstly, it is easy to implement, unlike other products like OpenStack.” – Gregoire Lamodiere, CEO, DIMSI
B2B Solutions
“We focus on providing B2B solutions for service companies,” said Grégoire Lamodière, CEO at DIMSI. “We specialise in helping organisations in the insurance, construction and finance sectors and so providing cloud services was a natural extension for us as the platforms matured and become more mainstream.”
“Our customers choose us because of our business values and our expertise, so it was important we were able to bring these to bear in any cloud solutions we offered. Initially, we turned to a Citrix implementation of CloudStack, utilising Xenserver. Citrix actually carried out the first implementation for us, with it taking 1 month to build and get security tested. We were then able to start migrating our VMs from existing hypervisors to CloudStack.’’
“Citrix eventually sold their cloud platform to another company and at this point both the costs and technical problems increased. Consequently, we decided to move to the CloudStack community.”
The benefits of Open-Source technology
Grégoire continued, “We decided that Apache CloudStack was the best solution for a number of factors. Firstly, it is easy to implement, unlike other products like OpenStack, which we found complex and can take up to a year to first install. Secondly, it is very reliable, and we know it will never let us down. Finally, we found the Open-Source community both helpful and willing to share.’’
“We like working with Open-Source technology because we want to know how things are built. Also, we like the way that the product is continually being developed and improved by its actual users, rather than a backroom development team, who are well away from the day-to-day use. We are keen to contribute to the community as we believe this is the best way to develop a product like CloudStack.”
DIMSI have now implemented Apache CloudStack across their infrastructure which utilises a mixture of proprietary and Open-Source solutions. From HP Blade servers with NFS and SSD based storage. Through 10 KVM hypervisors for their customers to use and Open-Source switching, this is all located at a green data centre in France.
Easy to implement and support
Providing cloud solutions to DIMSI’s customers does not require a massive back-room staff as Grégoire explained. “Because CloudStack is so easy to administer we are able to support our customers more efficiently. We currently have a team of 3 people, that we are looking to increase to 5. We are also backed up in this by ShapeBlue, who provide us with higher level support promptly, whenever we need it.”
ShapeBlue are the largest independent integrator of CloudStack technologies globally and are specialists in the design and implementation of IaaS cloud infrastructures for both private and public cloud implementations. They combine 100s of person-years of experience in designing and building complex network, storage and compute infrastructures with globally leading skills in Apache CloudStack.
Their services include Consulting, Integration, training and infrastructure support and their technical teams are all active contributors to the Apache CloudStack project with a good percentage of their team also being project committers.
Easy to implement and support
“We first met ShapeBlue at a user group meeting,” said Grégoire. “I could see immediately they were experts in the field and were exactly what we needed to help us continue to develop our CloudStack-based offerings.’’
“I would have no hesitation in recommending ShapeBlue to any organisation looking to implement and support CloudStack,” concluded Grégoire. “They really help us out with the more complex issues and consequently save us a great deal of time and money. I believe we have the best choice both with CloudStack and ShapeBlue and feel confident that they will continue support our business for many years to come.”
About DIMSI
DIMSI designs and implements innovative and efficient IT solutions adapted to the needs of its customers. Their areas of expertise and excellence cover:
• Consulting, integration and deployment of CRM Microsoft Dynamics 365 • High value-added services around the Azure Microsoft cloud
• Project management on IT projects with agile management
• Cloud infrastructure and hosting
• Digital transformation (organisation, IT strategy, governance)
Jamie had been involved in marketing for 3 years prior to joining the company. He is heavily involved in the marketing activities for both ShapeBlue and Apache CloudStack. In his free time, Jamie likes training MMA and rugby.
