IT Weapons Inc. is the winner of this year’s gold award for Best Cloud Computing Solution.
IT Weapons created a cloud computing architecture for a global asset management company that specializes in property, renewable power and infrastructure assets.Because its business is made up of various subsidiary units around the world, the company needed to find a new way to deliver its IT services to its employees, something that was a challenge before.
What the company needed was an IT solution that would be both economical and efficient and that would support them as they scaled up and down.
IT Weapons, which has worked with the company for the past 13 years, helped it to amalgamate their disparate IT teams into an independent business unit, which was responsible for delivering IT services to the company’s other business units and billing them accordingly.
Over time, the company expanded and its IT team was tasked to also look after those business units and its sub-teams too. This is one of the driving factors behind them seeking out a new solution to help better serve their business.
IT Weapons had a goal in mind to turn the company into its own third-party managed services provider. Because they were able to help them standardize on their infrastructure, it enabled the company to bill its business units according to their usage and demands, as opposed to what equipment was being purchased, for example.
Ted Garner, CEO of IT Weapons, said with its cloud computing architecture, IT Weapons helped the company reorganize and focus their expertise on the infrastructure layer, instead of on a specific business unit. What resulted were dedicated teams for virtualization and storage across the company, in addition to teams for application delivery, Windows infrastructure and networking.
“Essentially, IT Weapons gave (the company) the tools to become a private cloud computing IT provider, essentially mimicking our cloud services,” Garner said. “We helped the company deliver their services from huge central virtual resource pools (that are) metered according to usage. Once the standardized back-end was developed, they could employ management and monitoring tools that MSPs like us use to keep track of performance capacity, usage and cost.”
What makes the solution unique in the market place is that the cloud architecture had been designed as an open technology, so that it could not only integrate with IT Weapons, but with other providers as well, Garner said.
IT Weapons said the solution helped the customer cut their costs by more than $500,000 just last year alone.
IT Weapons prides itself on being able to be a true consultative partner to this customer.
Insite Computer Group took home the silver award, while OnX Enterprise Solutions won the bronze award.