For over a decade, this capital management company (CMC) has been providing back office services to several affiliated organizations with over US$17 billion of managed capital, operating on 5 continents, in over dozen countries. The affiliated companies share back office and infrastructure resources, with IT being managed by a single, lean team.

About a year ago, CMC's IT team decided to virtualize their mission-critical application environment. The disaster recovery (DR) requirement became a high corporate priority. Having spent well over half a million dollars on storage area network (SAN) hardware alone in the newly virtualized environment, the IT team was faced with replicating these and other capital expenses for a secondary, recovery site. In addition, there would have to be a 3-6 month time commitment allocated to building and deploying the DR solution. Achieving non-DR, strategic IT initiatives for the company became a risky commitment.

Xtium's Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offering made the “build vs. buy” decision easy. In a matter of weeks, the Xtium team designed and deployed the necessary resources to virtually host “copies” of CMC's IT environment (e.g., 40VMs : 3Tbs) and automated the virtual replication of CMC's IT (VMDKs) environment into XDC Tier-1 data center. Best of all, CMC's monthly fees for the service over 36 months cost less than the capital expense to purchase only the storage (SAN) hardware for the secondary site.

Over a year ago, this established, 250+ person privately held financial planning agency (FPA) had to switch its IT infrastructure when its main supplier of financial products was purchased by a major multinational company (MCO). Under the new regime, the MCO mandated that FPA use MCO-managed IT systems for mission critical business applications. However, FPA remained responsible for disaster recovery. It sought an IT partner that could effectively work with the MCO to extract FPA's valuable customer and transaction information for disaster recovery purposes on a continuous basis and at the same time to work this information into a parallel system controlled by FPA to insure redundant, continuous mission-critical application availability.

Xtium's Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offering made the FPA's disaster recovery partner choice easy. Over several weeks, the Xtium team worked with MCO IT to design and deployed the required processes and resources to virtually replicate the “copies” of FPA's critical business information into the parallel, secondary disaster recovery system, within the Xtium CO™ XDC facilities. And, the result is a win-win scenario achieved: (i) FPA obtained an independently controlled, secondary disaster and data recovery system, while building up an internal knowledge-based infrastructure to host their mission-critical workflow application staffed by highly skilled IT infrastructure experts; (ii) MCO get a better prepared commercial partner in FPA in the event of a disaster affecting its IT systems.

A key subsidiary (HSC) of a public company offers medical business process automation software to the health care community. With hundreds of millions of dollars in software licensing revenues, the division offers its products in several configurations including hosted and on-premises set up. As it started penetrating mid-market customers lacking dedicated infrastructure IT staff, the subsidiary identified the need to offer a dynamically hosted, high availability configuration for its software. Having considered working with legacy DR and IT hosting providers, HSC was not satisfied by the limitations of legacy offerings and kept looking for a hosting partner with greater flexibility to respond to its customers' needs. More specifically, it sought not to be locked-in into particular technology or hardware.

Xtium's Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offering made the HSC's hosting technology and trusted partner choice easy. Within weeks, the Xtium and HSC's teams designed and deployed the required resources to virtually configure and host “images” of HSC's software, on a per customer and even per unique user basis, within the Xtium CO™ XDC facilities. And, the result is a win-win-win set up: (i) HSC's customers get state-of-the-art on-demand infrastructure to host their mission-critical workflow application staffed by highly skilled IT infrastructure experts; (ii) HSC gets a trusted hosting partner with flexible choices in hardware and technology without diverting resources from its core software offering; and (iii) Xtium gets a larger customer base to spread the costs of its IaaS offering, leading to lower overall total costs of ownership for its entire customer base.

This several hundred million dollar public insurance company (Insurance Co) combined a strategic acquisition, which nearly doubled its size, with multi-state, multi-site facilities move and reorganization. Through a several month long RFP process, Insurance Co sought to gain a trusted partner to accomplish three main goals: (i) modernize its legacy IT systems, (ii) build an IT-based platform to accommodate current and future acquisitions efficiently and (iii) take over its operational burdens for comprehensively managing IT infrastructure, enabling the Insurance Co to focus on strategic initiative (e.g., continuous improvements and automation in policy administration processes).

Xtium's Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offering successfully answered the Insurance Co RFP call. In addition to accomplishing the RFP goals on time and within budget over several months, Xtium helped the Insurance Co deploy a state-of-the-art private wide area network (WAN), improving communications for data, video and VoIP. Virtualized “move” of existing Insurance Co IT environment made the physical move less risky and prepared the organization for continuous operations using virtual disaster recovery. Moreover, Xtium's taking of responsibility for the IT infrastructure freed up Insurance Co IT resources and executives to work on strategic business initiatives, such as the policy administration process improvements. Under one of the secondary benefits of the relationship, Insurance Co is able to rely on Xtium's SAS 70 audit to satisfy its SOX and other mandatory regulatory requirements.

This national leadership organization (NLO) maintains an established non-profit mission focused on helping young people and teens become better leaders. It sought a technology partner who could take on the operational burdens of dealing with nation-wide staff and facilities, while providing a single point of contact and responsibility for all IT-related support and technology.

Xtium's Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) has been the perfect fit for what NLO sought. In addition to operating NLO's entire IT infrastructure through Xtium's XDC facilities, NLO is taking advantage of the Xtium TQ™ total quality support center to manage issues with its over 20 dispersed offices.