How Argentina’s DataCloud Expanded Their Portfolio to Offer Everything as a Service

In today's competitive IT services landscape, it’s not enough to only offer one product. Customers demand comprehensive solutions that integrate multiple tools to streamline and optimize their IT infrastructure. And they won't wait for a service provider to architect the perfect solution. If your time to market is too long, they’ll look elsewhere.

You have to be fast and flexible to succeed in this market, which means starting with an efficient approach to infrastructure provision. That's why DataCloud adopted a consumption-based infrastructure model that allowed us to begin building right-sized solutions that meet our customers' immediate needs and that can scale as they need it.

DataCloud is an Argentinian company that provides software, infrastructure, backup, data recovery, and VDI—all as a service. We are a leading provider of pay-per-use and on-demand data services in our country. DataCloud holds both ISO 9001 and ISO 27001 certifications, which reflect our commitment to quality management and information security. These certifications attest to our dedication to providing secure and reliable services to our customers. Our infrastructure is hosted in Tier3 datacenters, ensuring high availability, redundancy, and reliability. This robust infrastructure underpins our ability to deliver exceptional services with minimal downtime.

We serve SMBs and enterprise clients in a variety of industries and have noticed a common denominator: Despite their diverse needs, our customers are moving away from buying and maintaining IT infrastructure at their data centers. They want to focus on strategy and delivering more value to their customers, and DataWise is here to help them make this transformation.

Offering Everything as a Service

Enterprise customers have been migrating to the cloud and utilizing an Infrastructure as a Service approach for years. SMBs are transitioning to this as well, and vendors have taken heed, increasingly offering all options wrapped as a service instead of following the traditional hardware sales and maintenance contract business model.

Offering “Everything as a Service” is a smarter financial model. It reduces customers' capital expenditures by allowing them to utilize the products and services they need right now, rather than try to guess what they will need for the future and buy all of that right away as a capital expense. We take that same approach internally, a choice that was made possible by the consumption-based offerings of the HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform.

The ability to purchase only what we need to serve our customers and to offload infrastructure maintenance to HPE has made us a more nimble organization—so much so that we have become the core growth division within DataWise. You could even say the HPE GreenLake platform helped birth our existing business strategy.

Taking Advantage of Built-in Tools

Leveraging the HPE GreenLake platform makes financial sense for DataCloud and our customers, but it has also transformed the speed with which we provision infrastructure. In the past, we had to architect and install bespoke infrastructure for each customer. They loved the service, but it meant they had to wait for hardware to arrive and learn how to maintain it before they could start developing services for their customers. They also had to forecast growth and buy more equipment than they needed to future-proof their infrastructure. This level of complexity took away time they could have spent adding value to their customers. It was highly inefficient and slowed us all down.

Now, DataCloud is taking full advantage of built-in tools within the HPE GreenLake platform to provide better services to our customers and plan for growth. We use HPE InfoSight to proactively monitor our infrastructure. Its powerful maintenance and predictive analytics tools allow us to detect and resolve issues before they lead to downtime and forecast capacity requirements based on usage patterns. The latter is critical because we often face delays when importing hardware into Argentina, so we have to plan ahead. Operating on a consumption-based model makes it easy to provision extra capacity when our customers need it without waiting for the delivery of new servers, storage arrays, and other physical infrastructure.

Another benefit of relying on the HPE GreenLake platform is working with an industry leader. HPE technology is ubiquitous and integrates well with other solutions. If we need a product or service that isn’t a part of HPE’s existing product suite, we can typically find a compatible solution and seamlessly add it to our tech stack. Look at data security, for example. We rely on the HPE Alletra 5050 and 6050 and HPE StoreOnce VSA, which combines scalable storage with ransomware protection for backups, and we can rest easy knowing that HPE incorporates the Silicon Root of Trust into their equipment, such as in HPE ProLiant servers. We also use external solutions to scan for vulnerabilities and offer additional protection, such as Tenable and Sophos. HPE technology provides a solid foundation we can build upon to create customized, secure solutions our customers can trust.

Large-Scale Projects and New Business Opportunities

The HPE GreenLake platform opens the doors to tremendous new opportunities for DataCloud. To fully leverage its potential, we recently launched an internal projects and innovations team to drive the development of new cutting-edge solutions for our customers, including Databases as a Service and machine learning (ML) tools. We are training this new team on the HPE GreenLake platform and onboarding their hardware to HPE's network management console to proactively address and anticipate their present and future needs.

The HPE GreenLake platform has allowed us to take on large-scale projects without the risk of upfront capital expenditures. We recently completed one such project for a government entity. This ambitious undertaking required us to supply 2,000 VDIs as a Service, and we couldn't have procured and deployed the needed infrastructure through a traditional hardware purchase.

We would have lost this project in the past, but because we had the consumption-based model of the HPE GreenLake platform, we could give them what they wanted—beating out bigger companies that have better budgets. But it's not just a matter of taking on large-scale projects. We are more flexible and can offer a broader portfolio of services to all our customers, whether they're SMBs, government entities, or enterprise-level businesses.

Evolving Our Business to Move Faster

Our customers recognize the value of our partnership with HPE, including faster times to market. They also benefit from HPE's partnerships with other industry giants, including SAP HANA certification for HPE hardware. Instead of waiting months for certified infrastructure from other vendors, our customers can order solutions from HPE's portfolio and deploy them immediately with the HPE GreenLake platform's pay-per-use model. We can now offer more for less, faster than the competition, because we will only deploy additional capacity as necessary instead of right away.

We have also recently obtained the SAP Certified in Cloud and Infrastructure Operations certification, which underscores our expertise in supporting SAP solutions in a cloud environment. This certification demonstrates our commitment to offering cutting-edge solutions to our clients.

We’ve had a long partnership with HPE, and we’ve been excited to build our cloud services offering around the HPE GreenLake platform. We have listened to our customers and changed our business to evolve with them, all without breaking the bank or allocating human resources to infrastructure management. Because HPE supplies equipment and support, we can focus on building and delivering solutions. This has allowed DataCloud to lay the groundwork for our expansion beyond Argentina into the Latin American and US markets.