NZ SME market on the hunt for better, cheaper products

Cloud and other emerging technologies are helping SMEs to disrupt larger businesses, and there is an increasing demand in the New Zealand market for products that are agile and affordable.

Anton Aalders, Spectrum chief technology officer, says, "Cloud, and to a larger extent in New Zealand, IaaS offers the ability to leverage the latest enterprise class technologies at a cost competitive consumption model that may have otherwise been out of reach.

"This has huge business benefits enabling more focus on the agility of quality products to market and meeting their customer demands rather than managing legacy IT infrastructure.

In order to capitalise on this and offer a product fit for SMEs, Spectrum has partnered up with Actifio.

Actifio's new product, Actifio One 'The Business Resiliency Cloud', is built on copy data virtualisation technology and restores the capability of business applications, replacing data protection and management tools with a single cloud-based service.

Aalders says, "I grabbed the opportunity to join Spectrum and we became the first Actifio Managed Services Provider in country to offer this Copy Data Cloud service to our customers.

"The ability to not only manage data better, but re-use the same production data for consumption into Dev/Test/DR environments is a huge step forward whilst reducing the cost to our customers.

"This has become the main focus of our business this year and opens many doors with the early success we are seeing.

Aalders says Actifio One fits well in the New Zealand marketplace and there is demand for such a product in this country.

According to Dave Simpson, 451 Research Storage senior analyst, "Actifio One seems well positioned to address the needs of the midsize enterprise market.

"First, our research indicates one in five large to midsize enterprises do not have a disaster recover plan in place, leaving 20% of the market exposed.

"Second, over one-third of these companies plan to redesign their backup or disaster-recovery infrastructure over the next 12 months.

"Finally, we know customers biggest storage pain points include consistently exceeding backup/recovery windows, and uncontrolled data growth.

"To address all of those challenges with a single, cloud based service – and in fact go beyond DR to deliver true business resiliency – is something this market both wants and needs," Simpson says.

Aalders says, "We have seen huge demand and it continues to grow, opening many doors as the conversation is an enabling one that is not focused on technology, rather how business agility and data consistency can be achieved whilst protecting and managing data securely.

"Having converted some household brand names in NZ already helps us grow, and develop too, as we continue to find different use cases and ways of realising the business benefits this technology offers.

Aalders says the product provides customers with rapid agility and cost savings, allowing Spectrum to better target the SME market.

"Rapid agile product development through the use of a single copy of production data is one of the key use cases.

"This has enabled development cycle times to reduce from many months into weeks, whilst reducing the cost of developing new products by up to five times in one customer's example.

"Once customers understand that the same virtualised data copy available for backup/DR can be re-used and surfaced in seconds to Spectrum's compute cloud with no additional data footprint required, this becomes a no brainer.

"The rapid agility and cost savings here are huge when compared to traditional methods of making more copies of the same data, not to mention the consistency and alignment across the dev/test stack," says Aalders.