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Company of the month CIO INSIGHTS VIEW POINT

CloudFX: Addressing Challenges in Cloud Migration and Paving the Way for IT Transformation

CloudFX: Addressing Challenges in Cloud Migration and Paving the Way for IT Transformation

SInGAPORE CLOUD SPECIAL

Damian Crotty, President & CEO

| | March 201510CIOReview | | March 201511CIOReview

According to Gartner, the global spending on public cloud services is

expected to grow to $210 billion in 2016. This study clearly heralds the revolutionary impact of Cloud on the IT world as the adoption rate is slated to

grow smoothly year on year. The hype around cloud services is partly the result of several vendors touting their latest and brightest cloud based solutions that are aimed to

turn businesses into more agile and streamlined processess. But this hype has been followed by its own myriad of challenges. Organizations are challenged when it comes to articulating how their

needs and requirements will be served once they migrate to the cloud. To many organizations, cloud is an entirely new platform and the respective IT teams expect strong and flexible cloud infrastructures that

can support complete IT operations while delivering exceptional service quality to the businesses. However, there is a big gap existing between what the cloud service vendors provide in terms of IT transformation

and what the organizations expect regarding financial and business growth via cloud technology enablements. Migration to the cloud seems to be plain sailing but in reality cloud migration brings all kinds of business and operational challenges to the organizations, which cloud vendors are gradually failing to address. It is an imperative requirement for an enterprise strategy for cloud computing to identify business problems with existing applications that cloud platform can potentially address and provide key reasons why cloud is the right strategic option. However, many global IT vendors today are tied to legacy strategy and products for migrating applications to cloud due to which they lack in real-time agility. This pitfall is exacerbated by the lack of specialist skills and knowledge to guide clients, thus leaving them inept of creating value and executing on the changing requirements of the Enterprise. Without necessary support and appropriate skilled resource required to navigate IT transformation journey to the Cloud, enterprises go through sharp downturns.

CloudFX: Addressing Challenges in Cloud Migration

and Paving the Way for IT Transformation

Cover Story

By Karishma B

Damian Crotty, President & CEO

| | March 201512CIOReview | | March 201513CIOReview

CloudFX, strategically headquartered in Singapore, has a good handle on the multifaceted nature of Cloud Computing from the vendor’s technologies that enable it, to the support of the world’s largest Enterprises with their Cloud transformation initiatives; be it in the areas of Strategic Advisory or large scale Infrastructure consolidations. “The industry has many companies which can talk about the ‘What’ and the ‘Why’ of Cloud Computing, but CloudFX is without peer in defining and executing of the ‘How’ of Cloud Computing, thereby accelerating the realization of benefits and enabling our customers to do what they do best, i.e. executing on their business priorities, supported by an infinitely agile, scalable, flexible and transparent IT environment underpinning success and growth”, asserts Damian Crotty, President & CEO, CloudFX.

Under the dexterous tutelage of Damian Crotty, a seasoned veteran executive in the IT industry who holds a more than clear understanding of the cloud computing environment, the company has created a demonstrable track record of executing flawless IT transformations in various Asian companies with its multi-vendor cloud platforms – including Cloud Consult, Cloud Select Cloud Service Brokerage (CSB) and Cloud DMS platforms and services. Since its inception in 2009, CloudFX has been focused on delivering measurable financial outcomes with sustainable business capabilities that transcends the technology domain and positively impacts technology services in an innovative and quantifiable way. “The most important part of positioning is our ability to understand exactly where our clients are on the journey, determine what’s next, quantifying the benefits of

that next step and enabling it through our services and product divisions, where each of these elements are separated from branded technologies and focused intently around the clients wants, needs and requirements”, says Damian.

Intermediating between Cloud Service Providers and Internal Business UnitsWhile high demand for flexibility and agility with cloud services prove to be a challenge for many cloud providers, Cloud Select- a ITaaS Cloud Service Automation and Management platform, serves as an aggregation, integration and customization point for Cloud services. Cloud Select’s unique feature of liberating Enterprise IT from expensive cloud services, thereby providing service flexibility, automation, agility and cost transparency makes it stand out from cloud based platforms. “This platform delivers the Hybrid Cloud in less than 60 days,” quips Damian. With the help of Cloud Select, Cloud FX constantly intermediates between cloud service providers and internal business units and concurrently orchestrates IT services around the strategic needs and requirements of each business unit. “We couple

this with the complete elimination, transaction and administration (payments, governance, data movement, customization and enrichment) from a large group of disparate providers via advanced, purpose built Cloud Service Management control panels,” articulates Damian.

Today when organizations are keen to move their existing legacy application to the cloud environment because of high cost of maintenance involved in integrating applications with modern tools and services, Cloud Select embarks on "Anything as a Service” strategy including (IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS) to deliver Cloud service innovation and cost advantages to their business with additional value-added services based on compliance, configuration, performance monitoring, capacity management, security, agility and availability, full stack provisioning and change management. Increasingly, IT honchos are turning to cloud solutions to fast-track their organizations’ journey of IT transformation. However, they struggle to navigate through the steps that they have to take to enable the

progressive switch to cloud and the modernization of their IT environment as part of that journey. Addressing these quagmires, Cloud Select provides an optimized starting point for enterprises

that are ready to fast-track their journey of

IT transformation with cloud offerings. “Cloud Select offers

50 percent + reduction in IT

capital expense, a 10X improvement in IT

Service Levels particularly in the area of Workload

provisioning and availability and granularity in consumption and cost

transparency around the use of all IT services within the Enterprise, in short, it’s the most revolutionary Enterprise technology to come to market that enables true scaled out Enterprise quality IT as a Service with the management sophistication, robustness and service quality”, adds Damian. Furthermore, this platform has multiple identities and can serve as a business process automation platform, an on-demand service request management platform, an Enterprise class Service automation platform, an intranet / internet E-Commerce based Cloud service aggregation platform, thus enabling multi-supplier management, advanced business intelligence functionality, full scale Enterprise service management and single integrated billing capabilities.

Three Stages of a Transformative ApproachIT transformation is aimed to trim down the exorbitant cost of underutilized IT infrastructure and turn into elastic and scalable “IT as a service” model. Adhering to this, CloudFX follows a model with three stages of IT transformation which enables it to provide a measurable, phased and pragmatic approach to its clients for sustainable IT transformation. Further, with its unwavering focus on delivering complete value to its customers, CloudFX enables transformation, builds capability, unlocks business value and offers improved business results and competitive advantage. The fervent team of technologists at CloudFX with extensive understanding of complex and demanding environments has successfully developed advanced IP Methodology and process, not just to streamline engagement process, but also to deliver consistent positive customer outcomes in highly complex and demanding environments. “Using virtualization, world-class tools and our

own IP, we automate service delivery and accelerate benefits realization. We have virtualized over 258,000 servers, 12,000 TB of storage and more than 550,000 client devices in the past few years alone”, explains Damian. Encompassing the entire spectrum of services ranging from Infrastructure, virtualization, Cloud Service automation, cloud orchestration, cloud managed services and Cloud brokerage services, CloudFX ensures long-term strategic client success in

the world of Cloud.

Streamlining the Cloud JourneyCloudFX is constantly focused

on aligning its investments towards the future of IT. Believing without a clutch in Multi-provider service aggregation, IT service automation and service

management of virtual service as core principles underpinning Enterprise IT, the company envisions of delivering great results for its strategic partners and customers and solving acute challenges for Enterprises around the world. CloudFX fosters a strong belief that an open and heterogeneous platform and secure multi-tenancies enable rapid integration and management of multi-provider cloud service offerings through a single central appliance whilst supporting tight alignment with business needs and IT requirements. The company had made a conscious choice to remain vendor agnostic and then proceeds to lead and support its clients with impartial advice. With local offices in Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Australia and across APJ, the company is poised for exponential growth in the years to come. Moving ahead with a positive outlook, CloudFX continues to provide its unflinching support to its customers and harness new technology revolutions as it becomes a phenomenon.

Cloud Select offers 50 percent + reduction in IT capital expense, a 10X improvement in IT Service Levels particularly in Workload provisioning

Damian Crotty, President & CEO