NetApp Adding 20 Firms to Partner Program for Service Providers

NetApp, Inc. announced that customers are reducing costs, managing business growth, and improving customer service with cloud services built on its technologies.

These cloud services are delivered through a global ecosystem of service providers who benefit from the NetApp Partner Program for Service Providers. Over the past six months, this global partner ecosystem has nearly doubled in size with the addition of more than 20 new partners; today it includes more than 50 service providers. In partnership with NetApp, these service providers deliver more than 90 services that help customers accelerate and simplify their transition to private and public clouds.

"NetApp’s success in establishing a strong partner ecosystem has enabled many of our enterprise and midsize business customers to achieve greater value, speed, and efficiency by leveraging cloud services offered by partners participating in the NetApp Partner Program for Service Providers," said Julie Parrish, senior vice president, Global Partner Sales at NetApp. "NetApp is focused on collaborating with partners – not competing with them – to help them increase their revenue, grow their businesses, and help customers succeed in capitalizing on the opportunities that adoption of public and private cloud solutions offer."

Customers Accelerate Business with Cloud Services
from NetApp Service Provider Partners
Service providers are collaborating with NetApp as their partner of choice to build, deploy, and sell differentiated cloud service offerings that help customers improve business outcomes.

BayGroup International Reduces Costs
with Cloud Services from Quest
BayGroup, a global negotiation and training company, reduced their IT spend up to 60% by storing all of their data and applications in a virtualized cloud environment. By using data protection as a service from Quest Software, they’ve shifted 80% of their spending to operating expenses and now need fewer people to manage local services such as data storage, backup, recovery, and day-to-day maintenance.

"Using Quest’s cloud service built on NetApp technologies, our savings have been tremendous," said Frank Lucido, director of information technology at BayGroup International. "Quest’s services are so proactive that we’ve liberated a full-time employee to focus instead on our core business-critical needs. Without Quest’s cloud services, BayGroup would need two additional full-time employees."

BlackLine Systems Manages Business Growth
with Cloud Services from Rackspace
BlackLine Systems provides a SaaS solution, which automates and controls the financial close process for Fortune 1000 companies. Their biggest challenge was scaling to meet the demands of an installed base that was growing at more than 100%, so they outsourced their IT infrastructure, using a Rackspace US, Inc. cloud service to expand their business without investing in their own IT infrastructure. The Rackspace hybrid cloud solution provided the security capabilities to overcome concerns with moving sensitive data outside their corporate firewalls.

"Rackspace and NetApp know that in the SaaS world, you’re only in business if your application is up and running," said Mario Spanicciati, executive vice president of operations, BlackLine Systems. "We selected Rackspace as our cloud service provider for the company’s winning combination of premier hosting infrastructure and services coupled with an always-available and knowledgeable customer service organization – along with the confidence of knowing it’s all backed by a solid NetApp storage foundation. By working with Rackspace and NetApp, BlackLine is able to provide clients with a reliable, secure, high-performance enterprise-class SaaS application. This solution enabled BlackLine to grow and focus on the areas that were important to us, taking our business further and faster than we could have done on our own."

Loughborough University Accelerates
Research Discovery with Cloud Services from Logicalis
Loughborough University upgraded its data center to improve IT efficiency and support to its extensive community of academic researchers. The university turned to Logicalis to consolidate their existing data center, creating a local private cloud integrated with the Logicalis UK hosted cloud for data protection. One of first hybrid cloud environments in the UK, this solution enables the university to free up resources to focus on its core educational mission and produce more research in less time.

"With our hybrid cloud solution from Logicalis based on NetApp technologies, we reduced our data center footprint by 80%," said Phil Richards, IT director of Loughborough University. "Power, cooling, and administrative expenses have been equivalently reduced, and we have increased the speed with which we serve the university community. With our old data center infrastructure, procuring IT support for new research projects took weeks. Our cloud now enables IT to act as a research accelerator. Faculty now receive IT infrastructure on demand, and this is making a major impact on time to discovery across the university."

Reinier de Graaf Groep Improves Patient Services
with Cloud Services from Proact
The Reinier de Graaf Groep in Delft is the oldest general hospital in the Netherlands. To improve the services that the hospital provides to patients and staff, it has undertaken a digitization of its patient files, laboratory reports, and X-rays. In order to realize data availability, a low operating load, predictable costs, and flexible storage and server capacity on a pay-per-use basis, Reinier de Graaf Groep selected infrastructure as a service (IaaS) from Proact Managed Cloud Services, based on the NetApp FlexPod data center solution.

"By selecting Proact infrastructure as a service, the Reinier de Graaf Groep is assured of the continuous availability of its data, both internally and on external workstations," said Marcel Slingerland, manager, ICT Reinier de Graaf Groep. "For the ICT department, this means that they don’t have to worry about the entire storage and server infrastructure and can focus on core tasks that directly benefit business processes."

Village Roadshow Reduces Cost
with Cloud Services from Interactive
Village Roadshow Limited, of Melbourne Australia, is an international entertainment company with core businesses in theme parks, cinema exhibition, film distribution, film production, and music. It was quickly outgrowing its data center due to increasing requirements for storage to support its ticketing, Web sites, and distribution for film and DVD rental operations. With an infrastructure as a service solution from Interactive Pty Ltd, Village Roadshow is managing its rapidly growing data volumes at a lower cost than an on-premise alternative.

"Opting for Interactive’s managed cloud storage, based on NetApp technologies, is a great stepping stone to a full cloud computing solution and offers great cost savings to Village Roadshow in comparison to the capital investments to build or upgrade our own infrastructure," said David Kindlen, CIO of Village Roadshow. "I look forward to further developing a relationship where I can buy computing power and storage on demand from an organization I trust."

About the Program
The NetApp Partner Program for Service Providers enables service provider partners to build differentiated, enterprise-class cloud service offerings and to operate profitably based on low-cost and predictable service levels.

NetApp welcomes the following new service provider partners, who bring enhanced portfolios of services to our customers across multiple geographies: AAPT, Adapt, Artisan Infrastructure, BSNL-Sai Infosystems, ControlCircle, Datacom, dinCloud, Easy Street, Fujitsu Asia, Fujitsu Thailand, Heitech Managed Services, IT-LifeLine, K-Opti.com, KVH, NTT Europe, Phoenix NAP, Proact MCS, StratITsphere, Stratogen, Nihon Unisys, NSSOL, NS Solutions, Telus, Tokai Communication, Windstream, and Wipro.

Simon Fisk, sales and marketing director, Adapt Services Ltd, said: "Our enterprise virtual data center offers custom cloud and managed services that scale perfectly with business requirements, meaning that our customers benefit from high performance with dual site synchronous data replication — without the traditionally associated management or financial burden. Our partnership with NetApp enables us to leverage NetApp MetroCluster technology to deliver continuous availability and in-built disaster recovery."

Carmen Carey, CEO, Control Circle Ltd., said: "Providing our customers with NetApp best-in-class solutions like our Enterprise Cloud and Disaster Recovery services sets us apart from other service providers. Winning Service Provider Partner of the Year for UK and Ireland was a true highlight for us and confirmation of the success of our partnership in bringing truly innovative IT solutions such as ControlCircle Enterprise Cloud Services. We look forward to building this out and providing vision as well as value to our customers, who rely on us to scale with certainty and give them a competitive edge when it comes to their business-critical infrastructure."

Ali Din, chief marketing officer, dinCloud, Inc., said: "Working with a tier one platform like NetApp has enabled dinCloud to speed the time and simplify the migration of customer data. Customers feel assured when they hear that NetApp technologies are an integral part of the dinCloud solution and that the two companies have worked closely to establish the dinCloud architecture."

Philip Wong, head of ASEAN SAP Competence Centre, Fujitsu Asia, said: "The partnership with NetApp has allowed Fujitsu to provide a comprehensive cloud service to our customers. This has translated to significant cost savings to our customers and higher operational efficiencies for our cloud managed services. Our continued partnership with NetApp will allow us to expand and bring more innovative lines of services to our customers."

Simon Durkin, director of sales, Interactive, said: "Interactive has made it a priority to provide world-class cloud solutions by investing in the best local talent and utilizing trusted partners, including NetApp. NetApp’s efficiency capabilities and integrated data protection enable us to offer leading SLAs at a price point that is compelling for large enterprise deployments. We are proud to be able to utilize this suite of products to build on the portfolio of services that we already provide to Village Roadshow and other enterprise customers."

Ken Rubin, senior vice president and general manager, Healthcare, Iron Mountain, Inc., said: "The explosion of clinical, patient, and imaging data and shrinking budgets have boxed many healthcare organizations into a corner, straining their storage capacity and IT resources to the limit as they struggle to manage the tidal wave of information. Iron Mountain’s medical image archiving offerings remove that burden by delivering the best of all worlds: unlimited capacity on a pay-as-you-go basis with improved off-site disaster recovery that is more cost effective and less complicated than doing it yourself. Our partnership with NetApp integrates their industry-leading storage technology designed for archiving big data with enterprise cloud storage services from Iron Mountain. This combination will help customers manage the long-term retention of medical information. As a NetApp Service Provider Partner, Iron Mountain is working closely with NetApp on joint sales and marketing initiatives that demonstrate the strength and value of our solutions, enabling healthcare organizations to address their data archiving and disaster recovery challenges."

Chris Gabriel, solutions and marketing director, Logicalis UK, said: "Through its partnership with NetApp, Logicalis is able to offer unique cloud storage solutions to its customers. For example, when Loughborough University needed to upgrade its data center, the key factor around storage was the multistore feature set and standardized platforms. Logicalis was able to consolidate the existing data center into two mini-pods, creating a local private cloud, and then integrate this on-site storage environment directly with the Logicalis hosted cloud. These innovative technologies and solutions delivered one of the first hybrid cloud environments in the UK. NetApp and Cisco have really come together and solidified what Logicalis sees as a robust architecture for enterprise-class private and hosted clouds. This hybrid model is now being replicated not only across the education market but also across the financial, retail, and manufacturing markets, because most customers are facing the same problems."

Georg Fasching, vice president, Products and Solutions, Luup International Ltd., said: "When we were looking for a partner to design, build, host, and manage the infrastructure that enables and delivers our managed service, ControlCircle was the natural choice. By deploying their disaster recovery as a service, we not only have a resilient disaster recovery solution across different sites in Europe but we have been able to leverage ControlCircle’s cost efficiencies."

Len Padilla, senior director of technology, NTT Europe, said: "NTT Europe is very focused on offering the best online business and managed hosting services in the market. NetApp has been with us on this journey for the last 10 years. With a market-leading technology proposition and sound execution in the service provider space, they enable us to drive business in key markets across EMEA. We need as much flexibility as we can get in order to accelerate go-to-market for new service offerings and to quickly react to customer demand. NetApp delivers all the time in a challenging, multicountry setup with tough requirements in terms of management, availability, and recovery."

Rob Christ, vice president, Managed Cloud Services, Proact, said: "The Proact MCS cloud offering is unique in its kind. Not only has it been around for almost 10 years and has proven itself, it is also the only true data and storage-centric cloud offering in the European market. Because of the in-depth knowledge and experience in the storage and data management market, Proact has the ability to migrate their customers into the cloud at their own pace, including the transactional production environments, while the business continues."

Ian McClarty, president, Phoenix NAP, said: "Phoenix NAP is proud to include NetApp technologies in our new public cloud offering, Secured Cloud. By leveraging the storage efficiencies of an industry leader like NetApp in our stack, we are able to provide end users with an optimal solution for their virtualization needs. The improved data portability and high-performance storage that NetApp offers allow the rapid and reliable scaling of cloud services as demands change, which is a critical business driver for any cloud solution. We are happy to have NetApp as a partner for our cloud infrastructure."

Matt Gerber, CEO, IT-Lifeline, said: "IT-Lifeline offers fully managed, cloud-based recovery as a service for physical and virtual environments specifically targeted to small and midsize organizations. As a managed service provider, we need technology that maximizes storage space to drive down costs while securely handling complex data storage environments. NetApp is a standout in the market. NetApp’s storage framework allows a truly secure multi-tenant environment, and thin provisioning allows us to reduce our storage cost and pass the savings to our customers. The flexible architecture supports the variety of applications, operating systems, and changing requirements demanded for disaster recovery. With NetApp, we eliminate the complexity of disaster recovery in the cloud and are able to provide our services at a lower cost."

Stephen Webster, president and CEO, StratITsphere, said: "We use NetApp as a key component in our new Nimbus package of cloud services. NetApp’s staff really understands the cloud and how to work with a service provider. They gave us the flexibility, efficiency, and quality we needed for our enterprise-class storage platform. Nimbus uses the capabilities in NetApp Data ONTAP to allow us to create virtual data centers and offer cloud storage as a service for clients to make their data and applications available anywhere in the world. NetApp also provides part of the backbone for Nimbus Mobility, which offers secure cloud computing on any mobile device, and Nimbus Operations Services, which allows our engineers to manage and monitor a client’s virtual IT infrastructure."

Karl Robinson, sales director, StratoGen, said: "VMware hosting services from StratoGen are engineered from the ground up to be extremely dynamic and resilient, allowing our clients to scale their resources instantly. We help organisations to drive down their costs, react quickly to changing business conditions, and provide simplified management of their resources. Our partnership with NetApp has been hugely important as it enables us to deliver a high-quality hosting platform that offers excellent performance with built-in failover capability."

Tony Krueck, vice president, Business Products and Services, TELUS Communications Company, said: "TELUS offers a range of hosted and cloud IT services to the Canadian business market. We are excited to leverage the latest NetApp storage technologies, which will add significant value to our IT solutions for organizations of all sizes. NetApp helps us provide a multi-tier, multi-tenant, and multi-function managed storage infrastructure that enables our team to deliver on virtually any customer storage requirement, using a single architecture. The flexibility of the NetApp architecture and reliability of NetApp software allow TELUS to minimize solution complexity and improve solution repeatability, enabling us to deliver more high-value services to our customers. These include advanced options such as integrated data protection for disaster recovery and backup, as well as storage efficiency features that help our customers save money. Our growing relationship as a NetApp Platinum Service Provider and reseller enables close collaboration with NetApp technical and account teams to drive quality and value to our mutual clients."