#Dimension Data Deploys Globally Standardised Managed Services For Data Centres

Dimension Data Deploys Globally Standardised Managed Services For Data Centres pic.twitter.com/eaw5DyDSR0
— Press Release Watch (@PrReleaseWatch) September 16, 2014

Dimension Data, the USD 6 billion ICT solutions and services provider today announced it is deploying globally standardised Managed Services for Data Centres. Built on the Group’s state-of-the-art Managed Services Automation Platform, the portfolio manages server, storage and networks for on-premise, cloud and hybrid data centres.

Earlier this year, Dimension Data announced it would quadruple the size of its data centre business to USD 4 billion by 2018. The launch of this suite of managed services is the next step in a set of strategic initiatives to expand the Group’s capability to consistently support domestic and multinational clients’ data centre transformation requirements.

Steve Joubert, Dimension Data’s Group Executive for Data Centres says, “We’re seeing a shift away from clients owning and managing their own data centre to outsourcing the entire infrastructure, or the management of the environment.  Even with the advent of cloud, Technology Business Research Inc.*

#Dimension Data acquires Teliris for an undisclosed sum

In a move to expand its Managed Services for Visual Communications (MSVC) operations, Dimension Data, today announced that it has acquired100% of Teliris, a privately-owned cloud video managed services business with offices in London, Connecticut and New York, for an undisclosed sum.  The acquisition is in line with Dimension Data’s aggressive growth plans, and provides the Group with immediate scale in the cloud and managed video space.

Founded in 2001, Teliris is one of the first industrypioneers to deliver cloud-based managed telepresence services, and provides immersive telepresence and videoconferencing services via its own proprietary platform, Lentaris™.

Dimension Data is the world's largest video integrator by revenue and endpoints. Dimension Data also hasthe most comprehensive set of on-premise, managed, in the private cloud or as-a-service video services in the world.  Through its MSVC operations, the organisation manages over 20 000 calls per month for 430 clients across 5 600 Cisco and Polycom endpoints today.

Steve Nola, Group Executive of Dimension Data’s ITaaS Service Unit said,“The acquisition of Teliris is an investmentin skills and expertise, and gives Dimension Data expanded scale to support the growth in our Managed Services for Visual Communicationsbusiness.  Teliris’ cloud capabilities complement Dimension Data’s existing portfolio of both cloud services and managed services offerings. This, combined with the excellent experience and skillset of the Teliris operational staff in the US and UK enables Dimension Data to accelerate the development of a true Video Conferencing-as-a-Service (VCaaS) offering to the market.”

Teliris CEO, Jeff Tench said, “Teliris was looking to join forces with a leader in the video and managed services space. Dimension Data’s breadth of service offerings, combined with the rich legacy ofimmersive telepresence and white-glove managed services from Teliris make a powerful combination in the market.   Teliris customers will benefit greatly as the new Teliris moves from the boardroom to the desktop with a comprehensive set of managed services for the entire video and unified communications estate.”

Teliris will retain its brand for the foreseeable future, and will continue to offer the services that it does today, and support its current managed services clients using its own proprietary technologies and cloud platform.

#Dimension Data become a #SAP-certified global provider of cloud and hosting services

Dimension Data, the USD 6 billion global ICT solutions and services provider, today announced it is now a SAP-certified global provider of cloud and hosting services for SAP® solutions. Dimension Data also released a set of pre-configured cloud server images that makes it easy, safe and cost-effective to provision an environment of SAP solutions. With Dimension Data’s cloud server images for the SAP ERP application available for its cloud clients, users can, in most cases, have a new cloud server operational on Dimension Data’s Managed Cloud Platform (MCP) within 30 minutes.

Dimension Data offers integrated, enterprise-class cloud services that enable businesses to leverage the flexibility of the cloud for both temporary and mission-critical data centre workloads, such as enterprise applications and production web applications. Dimension Data’s hosting and cloud services have been certified by SAP for meeting high-quality operational standards to deliver SAP software, including the SAP ERP, SAP Supply Chain Management, SAP Customer Relationship Management, SAP Product Lifecycle Management and SAP Supplier Relationship Management applications and SAP BusinessObjects™ Business Intelligence solutions. This certification applies to Dimension Data’s MCPs globally for the next two years.

Dimension Data clients can host their own environments running SAP solutions on Dimension Data’s cloud infrastructure or utilise Dimension Data’s cloud server images for SAP ERP. These consist of a set of standardised builds involving the SAP enhancement package 7 for SAP ERP 6.0, Microsoft Windows® 2008 R2 and Microsoft SQL Server® 2012 that can be deployed in minutes onto a virtual machine in the Dimension Data Cloud. 

Dimension Data’s public cloud and managed hosting environments enable clients and partners to develop, test and customise SAP applications quickly while reducing upfront capital expenses (capex)  and ongoing operating expenses (opex), delivering the benefits of mobility, flexibility and scalability for local and global SAP solution-based environments. Dimension Data supports the full data centre lifecycle of both mission-critical applications such as SAP ERP and temporary workloads. Its cloud capability enables clients to reduce the time it takes to make changes to their implementation of SAP applications, helping improve their agility to meet strict business timelines while reducing risk and increasing uptime.

Dimension Data’s cloud services leverage the company’s deep data centre and networking expertise and high-performance global cloud platform.  For enterprise clients and SAP’s ecosystem partners, Dimension Data’s combination of systems integration and cloud capability helps ease the transition of SAP applications from traditional data centres to a cloud environment.

“Our enterprise clients and provider partners can benefit from the right size, right scale and right time characteristics of the cloud to deliver significant cost savings and efficiency gains for their cloud-based SAP applications coupled with our experience in optimising the data centre,” said Steve Nola, Group Executive of Dimension Data’s IT-as-a-Service Business Unit. “SAP is the world's leading provider of enterprise software and services, and the certification of our cloud and hosting services is a vital part of our global strategy to enable clients to offload their SAP applications in production environments and temporary workloads.”

As an SAP global partner and SAP-certified provider of hosting and cloud services, Dimension Data will provide a cost-effective delivery model for mission-critical SAP applications. To achieve this certification from SAP, Dimension Data’s infrastructure, physical and logical security measures, processes, portal, and technical staff went through extensive review by SAP to validate the operational integration of its support of SAP applications to help ensure compliance with SAP's requirements for quality, availability and security. As an SAP-certified provider of cloud and hosting services for SAP solutions, Dimension Data can perform a range of IT services related to SAP applications, from initial proof-of-concepts to rapid deployments for customers of their SAP solutions.

To further ensure ongoing high standards for the management of SAP solutions, SAP-certified providers of cloud and hosting services for SAP solutions undergo a rigorous assessment of their delivery and support capabilities every two years by SAP’s outsourcing partner certification group.

Today, Dimension Data’s cloud services can be accessed globally via MCPs in San Jose, Calif., and Ashburn, Va., U.S.; Amsterdam, The Netherlands; Sydney and Melbourne, Australia; Johannesburg, South Africa; London, UK; Tokyo, Japan; and Hong Kong.

In addition to the newly released images for the SAP enhancement package, Dimension Data provides users with an online service catalogue of pre-configured commercial software as an operating system (OS) image that incurs additional charges when deployed as a server. This software can be software installed on the OS image or it can be part of the OS image itself. Dimension Data cloud software is priced hourly or monthly and provides the same pay-for-use flexibility of using cloud servers and cloud files.

Dimension Data has pre-built accelerators for small-, medium- and large-scale cloud deployments of SAP solutions. All of the cloud server images include Microsoft Windows® 2008 R2 Enterprise Edition, Microsoft SQL Server® 2012 Enterprise Edition and the SAP enhancement package 7 for SAP ERP 6.0. To activate the service, users must provide their own licences for SAP ERP.

#DimensionData To Quadruple Its Data Centre Business By 2018

Dimension Data, the USD 5.8 billion global solutions and services provider, said today that it will quadruple the size of its data centre business to USD4 billion in the next five years.
The Group’s existing USD1 billion data centre business has a significant presence in all major regions. It’s looking to aggressively grow and scale these businesses both organically and through acquisition. In addition, Dimension Data believes its access to a significant set of data centre assets across its parent company, the NTT Group, differentiates the business.
“In all regions and with all clients, large and small, there is an urgent need to undergo the transformation process needed to not only achieve better data centre performance and manage disruptive technologies but also to become progressively greener, in terms of environmental custodianship,” says Dimension Steve Joubert, Group Executive for the Data Centre Business Unit.
“Although all our markets are targeting exponential growth, our analysis shows there’ll be higher rates of growth in mature regions such as Europe and North America, given the legacy data centre investments in those geographies that require transformation. For many organisations, the most cost effective way of navigating the future will be through IT-as-a-Service, managed services, and outsourcing.”
Joubert says that the cloud, virtualisation 3.0, and software-defined everything have changed the data centre landscape forever. “New workloads, users, connected devices, and locations are compounding the pressure on the data centre and our clients are asking for help in dealing with all of this in a way that helps their data centre become a true ‘business response centre’, capable of being agile and speedy when the business needs it to be.”
“Getting there requires an integrated approach in the secure delivery of workloads and applications across the traditional data centre, cloud and the enterprise network, all of which make up the next-generation data centre. This calls for a level and range of capabilities that the average organisation doesn’t have and shouldn’t need to build or acquire when all the considerable benefits of cloud, networking, security, and systems integration experience as well as economies of scale and a global footprint are available through Dimension Data.”
Currently Dimension Data operates 12 public cloud locations around the world and further locations coming online in the next few quarters. Dimension Data significantly extends its cloud locations through its OneCloud partners, giving it one of the largest cloud footprints in the world.
Additionally, Dimension Data offers its clients the significant benefits of its membership of the NTT Group. NTT is the world’s second largest provider of data centre space, with some 243 secure data centres globally. Dimension Data also has access to NTT Data’s application and workload capabilities in industrial-strength solutions and services around SAP for example; and to the 6,000 engineers in NTT Facilities who have built some of the most advanced data centres in the world.
“This, coupled with our investment in people, process, and management capabilities focused on managing the next-generation data centre, gives us a massive advatage in the market,” Joubert says.

Dimension Data Expands Citrix Relationship

In a move to accelerate momentum and broaden scope across its solutions and services for client computing, cloud, networking, data centre and enterprise mobility, Dimension Data has expanded its global collaboration with Citrix. The two-year Global Market Acceleration agreement will see the two organisations co-invest to drive product management, sales and marketing efforts across Asia, Australia, Europe, the Americas and the Middle East & Africa.

Dimension Data will develop and integrate Citrix technologies more deeply in its existing solutions and services, all designed to meet growing client demand. Joint initiatives will be governed globally and executed locally to maximise market penetration.

Peter Menadue, Dimension Data’s General Manager for Microsoft Solutions, says, “There’s been an increase in the number of clients wanting us to help them enable their mobile workforce securely, while reducing costs and complexity of managing desktops and applications. Citrix technologies will enable us to do that. With Citrix bringing desktop solutions to market for a number of years now, it is very exciting to ramp up for even greater success across a wider range of solutions and services areas.”

Citrix has had a strong relationship with Dimension Data for many years, particularly in the Asia Pacific region. “We have a natural alignment through our mutual partnerships with Microsoft and Cisco – both of which have consistently supported the expansion of the Dimension Data and Citrix relationship,” he says.
And it seems their mutual clients agree. Dimension Data worked with ICT at the University of Sydney to deploy software and support its networks for several years. Dimension Data has completed multiple projects and maintains a strong relationship with the university.

“We needed a system that would enable students to access a range of applications from a wide variety of locations, potentially using different devices,” says Richard O’Connor, Project Manager, Information and Communications Technology at the University of Sydney. “Dimension Data stood out because its staff listened to what the university was looking for and addressed key requirements.”

Tom Flink, VP Channels and Market Development at Citrix, says, “Dimension Data’s focus on innovation in cloud, networking and mobility mirrors our own, and makes our plans to expand our relationship an exciting opportunity for both parties. Additionally, their strong partnerships with both Microsoft and Cisco make them a unique partner to us.”  

About Dimension Data
Founded in 1983, Dimension Data plc is an ICT services and solutions provider that uses its technology expertise, global service delivery capability, and entrepreneurial spirit to accelerate the business ambitions of its clients. Dimension Data is a member of the NTT Group. www.dimensiondata.com

Dimension Data Introduces Next Generation Managed Services For Visual Communications

Dimension Data, the $5.8 billion ICT solutions and services provider, today announced an enhanced version of its Managed Services for Visual Communications (MSVC) offering. MSVC, the world’s first truly global service of its kind, takes the headache out of video management because it focusses on maximising end-user adoption – and, ultimately, return on investment.
Ian Heard, Dimension Data’s Group General Manager, MSVC says, “Dimension Data is the world’s largest video integrator by revenue and endpoints. Through our Managed Services for Visual Communications, we manage 20,000 calls per month for 430 clients across 5,600 Cisco and Polycom endpoints today. We are already a big contender in this space, with the most comprehensive set of on-premise, managed, in the private cloud or as-a-service video services in the world.”
One company that moved quickly to exploit videoconferencing when it first became generally available is British American Tobacco. Working in partnership with Cisco, Dimension Data replaced the organisation’s videoconferencing infrastructure at 25 British American Tobacco sites across five continents in only six months; reducing cost, risk and business disruption.
Also, British American Tobacco wanted to extend its videoconferencing options beyond telepresence rooms in order to give individual employees access to videoconferencing from their desks or their homes. Today, British American Tobacco has a future-proofed means to fully exploit its collaborative work culture as a differentiator in the market. With the choice of a full range of videoconferencing technologies, from fully immersive telepresence rooms, to executive desktop and remote worker mobile solutions, British American Tobacco employees can easily communicate face-to-face, no matter where they’re located.
Andrew Cunningham, British American Tobacco’s Head of End User Computing, says, “We had originally intended our WAN provider to manage the international shipping of the Cisco equipment. However, it very quickly became clear that Dimension Data had an exceptional ability to operate effectively across all sorts of regulatory environments. Also, it’s extraordinarily flexible and responsive to client needs and able to put resources on the ground in places where other companies can’t.”

According to Heard, if managed effectively, videoconferencing has many benefits. “Not only can employees become more productive and organisations more agile, videoconferencing has the potential to transform the way we collaborate externally with colleagues, clients and partners. The critical element to the success of an organisation’s videoconferencing ROI lies in the area of user adoption. If employees don’t use videoconferencing, the knock-on effect is that their colleagues and clients won’t either. Consequently, the business won’t derive the benefits that the technology was originally purchased to deliver.”
Scalability is also a big challenge for corporates. “We are seeing a number of organisations struggling to grow their support infrastructure to cope with the increasing number of endpoints that mobility and UC integration is bringing. That’s because IT departments can’t keep up with supporting the growing number of users in those critical first two ‘golden’ minutes after something goes wrong on a video call. In our experience, that’s when users are most likely to abandon the service and opt for a voice-only alternative,” says Heard.

“When we launched the first version of MSVC in 2011, the market was focused purely on the bridging and connectivity aspects of making a videoconference call. No provider was addressing the underlying issue of delivering mission critical reliability and ease of use for the user with services such as our Concierge and Executive Support services. These services allow a user to simply book a meeting and the videoconferencing call is established without them having to pick up a remote control.

“With the enhanced version of MSVC, we have taken mission critical reliability and ease of use to a new level with the development of new management and scheduling tools. Now, users know that when they book a call, the only other aspect they need to worry about is what to say in the meeting. Our goal is to enable collaboration and continue to deliver videoconferencing on an open, standards-based platform without confining clients to expensive proprietary networks, and network services that don’t integrate with their broader unified communications estate,” he says.

About Dimension Data
Founded in 1983, Dimension Data plc is an ICT services and solutions provider that uses its technology expertise, global service delivery capability, and entrepreneurial spirit to accelerate the business ambitions of its clients. Dimension Data is a member of the NTT Group. www.dimensiondata.com