Charles River simplifies software management with hosted virtualization
Moving its VMware environment to private cloud helped improve customer experiences, while reducing total cost of ownership.
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Sector
SaaS & ISV, Technology
Desafío
Charles River wanted to move its enterprise SAS platform from customer data centers to a virtualized Charles River managed and hosted solution to improve efficiency, its customer experience and ROI.
Soluciones Private Cloud Plataformas VMwareProfessional & Managed Services
Professional Services, Managed ServicesOur customer
Charles River Development is an investment management SaaS and services provider for some of the world’s largest insurance companies, and mutual and pension funds in more than 40 countries. Over 25,000 users leverage its investment offering to manage more than $25 trillion in assets.
“Rackspace Technology has done a very good job of helping us change the traditional delivery process by taking steps out of the provisioning process.”
The obstacles they faced
In its early days, Charles River offered hosting and application management as optional services. But, as its client base grew, Charles River learned that its “traditional ways of deploying and provisioning systems were simply not fast enough,” said Edward Fitzpatrick, Vice President of SaaS Operations “They were still too labor-intensive.”
Several years ago, it made a strategic decision to offer a hosted solution as an alternative to its on-premises model. Also, the organization wanted to move its SaaS from customer data centers to virtualized infrastructure to increase efficiency, improve the customer experience and lower costs.
It realized it could significantly improve customer experience and total cost of ownership by creating a private cloud-based offering combining Charles River’s software expertise, standards and best practices with high levels of customization and integration capabilities.
“Many of our clients found it challenging to manage the complexity of an enterprise platform on their own. So we created hosting and application management services,” said Fitzpatrick.
“Clients could focus on what they do best, which is trading and managing investments. And we could focus on what we do best, which is running the Charles River platform.”
However given the mission-critical nature of the investment platform, Charles River had to choose a solution carefully.
“Fanatical Experience is much more than just a slogan for Rackspace Technology. You can feel it when you talk to Rackers and feel their passion for customer service.”
How we helped
The breadth of the Rackspace Technology portfolio — including deep experience in both cloud infrastructure and threat-centric security — strongly appealed to Charles River. Rackspace Technology engineered a secure, stable and scalable VMware environment that delivered both the efficiency gains and enhanced capabilities Charles River had envisioned.
Rackspace Technology also aligns Charles River’s internal support teams (sales, network security, storage and virtualization) to streamline and increase the agility of its service delivery, so the company could accelerate SaaS deployment. And it worked with Charles River to streamline the company’s delivery methods and accelerate SaaS deployment.
“We’re working to leverage DevOps technology to automate server and virtual machine provisioning,” said Fitzpatrick. “We have our first application of that technology running in one of our environments hosted on Rackspace Technology.
He added, “We’re also continuing to push the envelope to try to take time out of the process. We’re talking with Rackspace Technology about ways we can integrate our objectives of faster provisioning with its capabilities.”
While its Rackspace-led transformation has provided great value for Charles River, the company has found additional value in the responsiveness of Rackspace Technology specialists.
“We grew very quickly, and we know we’re a very demanding client,” said Fitzpatrick. “But what’s really worked well for us is having stability and consistency in the account team. They get to know us. They understand us and our customers. They know what’s driving us. And they know what they need to do within Rackspace Technology to deliver the services that make us successful.”
Fitzpatrick sees the larger culture of Fanatical Experience® at work in his interactions with his account team and other Rackspace employees. “I remember the first time I was introduced to Rackspace Technology, I saw the slogan, Fanatical Support, and I smiled,” Fitzpatrick said. “It sounds great, and I’ve dealt with many hosting vendors over the years and, in all honesty, I have to say that it is true.
“That really is a key differentiator. Some of the bigger traditional hosting providers are solid, but they’re just not as responsive and energetic in trying to meet customers’ needs as Rackspace Technology. So, it’s far more than a slogan for us.”
What we achieved together
With help from Rackspace Technology, Charles River has restructured its traditional SaaS delivery model to provide a modern customer experience, while leveraging DevOps to automate server and virtual machine provisioning. Charles River plans to drive aggressive growth by leveraging Rackspace Private Cloud Powered by VMware to automate and accelerate SaaS provisioning and management.
“After we adopted Rackspace Managed Services and virtualization, our hosting business, and what we now call our cloud-based solution, really started to take off,” said Fitzpatrick. “The timing was great. At that point, our customers had gotten more comfortable with the idea of outsourcing and running critical applications in the cloud. So it all came together at the right time and has since grown at an impressive rate.”
To advance its capability to the next level, Charles River has decided to proceed with Rackspace Private Cloud powered by VMware. The success of the solution to date, along with an increased effort to win new SaaS clients and transition existing clients to the cloud, has created a new challenge for Charles River — explosive demand.
“That’s where Rackspace Private Cloud powered by VMware comes into play,” said Fitzpatrick. “We see this solution as critical to enabling us to meet our growth projections.
With Rackspace Private Cloud delivering a software-defined data center (SDDC) capability based on VMware technologies, Charles River will benefit from end-to-end virtualization of the entire private cloud stack. The full solution includes compute (vSphere®), storage (vSAN®) and network virtualization (NSX®).
“A virtualized software-as-a-service (SaaS) environment helps us provide a more cost-effective, flexible foundation for supporting our clients with the best possible solution to meet their needs,” noted Fitzpatrick. “We can roll out upgrades more frequently to give them faster access to new feature sets and enhancements with a predictable, scalable cost model.”
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