Expect success? Want your company to thrive? Pull up your sleeves, and take action. After many years spent working on EasyDCIM, we know that taking a proactive approach definitely pays off in the data center management sector. Another thing we know is that you won’t handle all the hassle without the right set of tools. Don’t worry, EasyDCIM stands ready to assist you.
Always hungry for fresh industry-specific knowledge that can push our project forward, Konrad Keck, EasyDCIM’s Founder & CEO, has recently reached out to one of our esteemed customers – Joe Schoonbeck, SVP of Service Operations at Colohouse – and invited him for a quick chat concerning our fruitful cooperation.
Hello Joe. It’s such a pleasure to finally talk to you.
Joe: Hi, Konrad. Yes, I’ve been looking forward to this conversation as well, and I’m glad we’re actually doing it, despite our busy schedules.
Happy to hear that. For starters, I’d like you to give us some background about your company. You know, standard details like where you operate, what you offer, who you target…
Joe: Sure thing. Colohouse provides technology infrastructure services including colocation, connectivity, bare metal, cloud and managed service solutions. Our Bare Metal Hosting products are currently offered in Albany, New York, Miami, Colorado Springs, Chicago, and – stepping beyond the USA – Amsterdam. Our customers cross a wide spectrum of industries and sizes around the world, from family-run pizza shops to fortune 500 companies. With our recent acquisition of Hivelocity.com our footprint has expanded within the US and internationally as well to over 40 locations across 6 continents.
Impressive! Can you shed some light on your plans for the future?
Joe: Well, we obviously like to watch things go up and to the right. Over the coming year we will be integrating products, services, systems, and brands with Hivelocity. One of our top priorities is expanding the functionality of our customer portal to support full automation and API capabilities for all products and services, not just bare metal.
Sounds big, and I’ll most certainly be keeping up. Now, speaking of the whole decision-making that lies at the bottom of your development, I wonder what exactly made you choose EasyDCIM.
Joe: We chose EasyDCIM because of its native integration with WHMCS and enterprise feature set including PDU, switch, and IP address management. It was a simple, cost effective, all-in-one solution to managing our local and remote bare metal hosting deployments and associated parts inventory.
Did you use any other solution and face some sort of problems that ultimately made you switch?
Joe: This is precisely what happened. Previously we leveraged a combination of in house solutions based on open source software that was not natively integrated. IP addresses were in a separate system from provisioning, which was separate from PDU management, and so on. The disjointed and custom nature of the old way of doing things caused a lot of operational overhead. Once we realized that, we knew we needed something different, and that’s when we decided to give EasyDCIM a shot.
Luckily! In a nutshell, what is it about EasyDCIM that has helped you achieve your goals?
Joe: Efficiency at scale is a primary driver to our success at Colohouse. Utilizing software that “just works” so both your staff, and your customers can have a consistent and positive user experience.
Let’s have a glance at the toolkit. What is your favorite feature of EasyDCIM?
Joe: Asset tracking and instant – and reliable – provisioning are definitely top features. Our favorite though, is the integrated IPMI & iDRAC proxy that allows customers to access remote consoles from our billing system’s client area, without needing to assign public address space to facilitate the connections. This is all done over an internal private network that works independently within each data center location and is fully happening behind the scenes.
I always felt it was essential we focus on streamlining remote server management as much as possible. My consideration: automation brings convenience, and convenience brings customers. Given what you’ve already said, would you recommend EasyDCIM to other companies?
Joe: We would definitely recommend EasyDCIM to any bare metal hosting provider looking to better automate or integrate their systems. The support team behind the scenes has been rarely needed, but excellent to work with. New feature requests or functionality changes are always met with open minds and added to the product roadmap. Migrating to EasyDCIM was one of the best decisions our hosting department has ever made.
It truly is an amazing feeling when you hear someone praise what you’ve been doing, and the way you’ve been doing it. Thank you, Joe, for your time and all those kind and enthusiastic words about EasyDCIM. I truly hope that both our companies will continue to grow in strength, and that our paths will remain crossed!
Joe: Cheers to that!
This is not the first time EasyDCIM has been met with such hearty applause. And there’s a reason for that: we never fail to attend to our customers’ needs, and we never make stops on the progress road. Need guidance on your own data center journey? Consider us up for the challenge.