UK IBM Power Cloud Partner Blue Chip Grows Cloud Revenue 700% at £36 Million

Blue Chip Group, provider of cloud and on -premise infrastructure solutions and services, announced that strong customer demand for its next-generation business resiliency, business agility, and cloud mobility services has triggered an increase in their investments in Actifio, Inc.‘s copy data virtualization platform.

Blue Chip uses Actifio’s copy data virtualization platform
to power multiple cloud service offerings, including:

• Application Recovery Assurance – BC in the cloud with testing automation
• Innovative Application Vaulting – Bandwidth and storage efficient cloud data protection
• Cloud On-Ramp Services – SLA-based data migration with zero production impact
• Application Development in Cloud – Up-to-date virtual copies available in the cloud for accelerated dev/test

Blue Chip has grown organically over its nearly 30-year history to become the largest independent provider of IBM Support services. The company’s tier 3 and tier 4 Design Data Centres in Freehold boast a Power Usage Efficiency of just 1.1, enabling to deliver stable contracts insulated from rising power costs, what the company calls Stability Through Green IT.

The firm has nearly 900 global clients and turnover of £36 million last year, with its managed service business growing at 40% annually. The company is increasing its customer base in backup and ‘data management as a service’ and is migrating all of its current datacentre customers onto Actifio.

“The cost of our incumbent’s backup bill was growing all the time, and you couldn’t see an end to that growth,” said Brian Meredith, MD, Blue Chip. “With Actifio, all that changed. We could scale infinitely and only pay once, without any hidden surprises. This free-hold ownership has meant we have been able to upsell more and pass savings onto our customers – which is why we’ve chosen to nearly double our Actifio investment.”

Actifio virtualises data as other technologies have virtualised compute and networking, decoupling the management of increasingly strategic enterprise data from enterprise infrastructure. The company’s Virtual Data Pipeline (VDP) technology decouples data from infrastructure, enabling improvements in business resiliency, agility, and access to the cloud. It replaces siloed data management applications with a simple, application-centric, SLA-driven approach that lets customers capture data from production applications, manage it more economically, and use it when and where they need to.

Blue Chip has used VDP technology to improve the ease, speed, and operational complexity of its data recovery services, creating the dual leverage of rising customer revenue and declining capital intensity.

“Actifio provides a stable framework for all our backup and restoration requirements,” said Meredith. “We’re working towards a tapeless datacentre in the next 18 months and Actifio is playing a central role in this move alongside VTLs. We’re constantly upselling and obtaining new customers and Actifio allows us to be at the cutting edge as we rollout new agile business services.”