Radiant Extends Customers Data Centers

As Canada’s business-to-business broadband service provider, Radiant Communications Corp. wanted to deliver on their company mission: to be a strategic partner to its customers and to solve their business challenges. Therefore, Radiant built a shared IT infrastructure to offer hosted applications and services for mission-critical enterprise environments.

Radiant’s cloud-based services extended into the enterprise through computing power, application hosting, disaster recovery, even complete virtual data centers. Because its customers wanted to run their ERP and retail point-of-sale systems on the Radiant infrastructure, those services needed to be secure, reliable, and cost-effective alternatives for customers building and managing their own infrastructure. At the same time, Radiant wanted to make sure that it based its new cloud computing services on Flexible IT.

Using technologies and solutions from NetApp, Inc., Cisco, and VMware, Radiant built a flexible shared IT infrastructure that is secure enough to be considered an extension of its customers’ IT environments. The shared IT infrastructure enables the company to deliver a virtualized environment, traditional dedicated hosted servers, or a hybrid virtual plus dedicated mixture, depending on each individual customer’s specific needs. And because it is all delivered from a single IT infrastructure, Radiant’s costs and time to deliver are minimized, allowing Radiant to maintain flexibility and a powerful competitive edge.

"The Flexible IT infrastructure enables us to offer our customers the specific service they need at a price they can’t necessarily match," says Jason Leeson, director of Advanced Hosting for Radiant. "We offer a lower total cost of ownership than they’d be able to do themselves. At the same time, we’re able to address their concerns about transparency and loss of control. They don’t need to tradeoff. It’s a huge part of our value proposition."

Additionally, Radiant’s infrastructure is secure and scales and with changes on demand, and is easy to learn and manage. But ultimately, the company has bigger plans.

"We sell our customers flexibility," says Leeson. "That means Radiant’s infrastructure has to scale, too. With an environment that leverages NetApp, Cisco, and VMware technologies, we have that capability. Secure multi-tenancy was another huge selling feature. … [Customers] are reluctant to give up transparency, control, security, and privacy. With secure multi-tenancy, they simply don’t have to compromise."

The NetApp, Cisco and VMware solution enables Radiant to provision services much more quickly, which allows the company to scale its business, operational model, and staff without hiring new people. The company can standardize, scale, and automate its business in the long run, which further drives down its costs. As a result, Radiant anticipates it will realize a return on its investment in just 10 months, based on its business plan and improvements in operational efficiencies realized with the deployment of this system.

"Everything we do is for our customers. We want to keep them happy," says Leeson. "We look for ways to increase customer satisfaction. The more efficiency we can get – automate provisioning and management and monitoring – will help us, because as we keep our costs down, we can pass the savings on to our customers in the form of better pricing."