Each year, our sister publication Computer Dealer News hosts the Channel Elite Awards to recognize IT Solution Provider for their innovation, leadership, and commitment for creating value for their customers. As Canada’s leading IT channel publication, CDN invited solution providers to submit their best work to nine different categories for 2013’s awards. Here, we present the case studies these award nominees put forward to us. Find out who the big winners are on Sept. 11 when CDN presents them at the CEA Awards Gala.
Learn more about CDN’s Channel Elite Awards 2013
Nominee: OnX from Thornhill, Ontario
Managed Services Solution description
As a leading Canadian Managed Services provider, OnX offers Managed Services & Managed Hosting Solutions, and we are experts in delivering hybrid dedicated and cloud solutions for more complex environments. Our Managed Services encompass the full spectrum of data center delivery, OS, Application Management, as well as Professional Services. OnX believes in partnering with our clients to understand their specific business objectives and tailor a hosted environment designed to meet their requirements. OnX delivers to SAS a number of managed hosting environments for each of their business intelligence end customers which include the full spectrum of managed hosting (hardware, bandwidth, backup, OS management, patching, monitoring) and a full 99.99% SLA guarantee for availability and performance. OnX is listed as a Major Player for IaaS Cloud by IDC Canada in their Marketscape report.
What makes your Managed Services innovative or original compared to the competition?
OnX Managed Services deliver a fully managed, secure, reliable and responsive solution for SAS that allows them to deliver the analytics of tomorrow as a hosted model, today. As a dedicated and focused service provider OnX works in lock step with SAS to ensure each client engagement meets their specific requirements for availability and performance. We do this by taking a consultative approach and working in tandem with SAS’s engineering and sales team and customizing a solution to include redundant hardware, backup, security, monitoring and 24×7 live support. OnX is agile, nimble and creative in our approach to meeting unique client needs and we are able to out maneuver the typical large outsources as well as the traditional telco solution providers. This agility gives us the ability to listen to clients, create a solution based on the requirements, turn around a quote and close the business in half the time most providers today would take.
What were the benefits of your Managed Services Solution for your client and what evidence can you provide to show this?
By working with OnX Managed Services, SAS is able to offer a turnkey solution to its end customers allowing the company to gain more market share and increase sales and revenues by beating the competition. The model we have in place allows SAS access to our sales support specialists, engineering and marketing teams to bring the full weight of our capabilities to the table when presenting a solution to the customer. SAS has seen a dramatic increase in sales in Canada and by being able to offer a turnkey hosted model, and we are enabling a piece of that growth.
What are the main reasons that your Managed Services are better for the customer than an on-premises solution?
Because security is paramount to the end customer processing sensitive business intelligence data, OnX provides annual audits for both SAS70 (now SSAE16) as well as the highest level of PCI DSS certifications. Finally, OnX brings subject matter experts to the table for managed hosting so that SAS can focus on their core competency and leave the day-to-day back-end to us. OnX Managed Services offers 24×7 support for all SAS environments which means that SAS can contact us at anytime, night or day and we are accountable to them with a full service level guarantee.
How did the Managed Service improve the customer’s ability to server its internal or external clients?
The OnX Managed Service improves both SAS’s ability to service its end customers and allows those same end customers to avoid costly infrastructure build-outs on premises. SAS is the undisputed leader in advanced business analytics and through working with OnX Managed Services they can rest assured the mission critical servers and applications are always available and always secure. This allows them to focus on their core competency of servicing their clients’ analytics needs and leave the back end to OnX.
How does the solution further your client’s green or environmentally friendly plans?
OnX engineers its solutions to offer the most energy efficient consumption of compute, power and cooling to meet the needs of the specifications. OnX is also able to free-cool the data center in the winter months in Canada and this offers a reduced environmental impact as this means we consume less power to run the HVAC units.
