From pillars to host

Q

Please can you provide some background on K3 Hosting –
when/why formed and overall progress to date?

A
K3 Hosting was built from an overwhelming demand from the growing customer base to provide them with cloud services that provided real benefit with a simple approach. The division started some 6 years ago and in that time we have grown considerably delivering reliable and simple cloud solutions to over 4,000 customers covering over 29 different countries.

Q
Who are the key personnel behind the company?

A
Neil Farnworth, Managing Director
Ed Renwick, Sales & Marketing Director
Steve Donaghue, Operations Director
Stuart Buckley, Head of Channel and Alliances

Q
What are the USPs that K3 Hosting looks to bring to what
is quite a crowded market?

A
From Infrastructure to the Application layer, K3 Hosting can provide its customers with complete flexibility, industry expertise, robust SLA’s and a commercial model to suit any situation.

Q
In broad terms, what are the products and services in the
company’s portfolio?

A
We strive to cut through the complexity of cloud and offer our customers, simple and easy to understand pillars of service which allow us to provide a comprehensive offering across the board. Our core service pillars are Infrastructure, Platform and Software and we have six supporting service pillars which are Storage, Disaster Recovery, Network, Hardware, Support and Professional Services.

Q
Can you provide some more details on the Infrastructure-as-a-
Service offering?

A
The K3 Hosting IaaS offering is a hosted Enterprise Class Cloud Service that is built on the very best technologies with options available for dedicated or shared infrastructure resources. Each customer gets a secure virtual datacentre with contracted service level agreements based on things that matter to them individually.
Pay monthly for hosted server, network and storage services according to usage, free up capital budget, deliver service levels that exceed service requirements and leave your IT team free from operational tasks to focus on business development projects and testing.

The key benefits are; TCO Reduction, Dynamic Scaling, Flexibility, Simplicity and pay as you grow models.

Q
What about the Platform-as-a-Service offering?

A
K3 Hosting’s Platform as a Service (PaaS) is an outgrowth of Software as a Service (SaaS), a software distribution model in which hosted software applications are made available to customers over the Internet. PaaS has several advantages for developers. With K3 Hosting PaaS, operating system features can be changed and upgraded frequently. Geographically distributed development teams can work together on software development projects. Services can be obtained from diverse sources that cross international boundaries. Initial and ongoing costs can be reduced by the use of infrastructure services from a single vendor rather than maintaining multiple hardware facilities that often perform duplicate functions or suffer from incompatibility problems. Overall expenses can also be minimized by unification of programming development efforts. The benefits are Reliability, Reduced operational costs, Lowering risk and giving our customers a strategic advantage over their competition.

Q
What does the Software-as-a-Service product cover?

A
K3 Hosting’s Software as a Service (SaaS) model for hosting such applications offers the solution to these issues. Pay monthly according to the number of users, scale the service up or down and benefit from the assurance of knowing that K3 Hosting’s service desk is monitoring and managing your application 24x7.
K3 Hosting’s Private Cloud for SaaS is unique. We don’t offer multi-tenant versions of Exchange or SharePoint as they are too restrictive for our customers and compromise on security and availability. Our model is to design (using our standards), deploy and manage a new application platform tailored to suit your needs that offers no compromises on security, availability or flexibility. Our most popular SaaS products are Active Directory, Windows, SQL, Exchange, and MS Office. We have a wide range of products customers can add and remove as required on our SaaS Service Pillar.

Q
What are the specifics of the Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service
product?

A
With our DRaaS service pillar we chose to be broad and non restrictive in our offering and provide resilient HA recovery options all the way to delivering hardware to site in a mobile unit which sits outside the building and gives our customers the range of options needed to suit their own objectives around recovery.

Q
How doe the Storage-as-a-Service offering differ from
the DR one?

A
DR is about recovery and resilience, the Storage Pillar is more about providing our customers with the ability to get away from traditional storage procurement and the pains of decision making on which technology to buy. Purchasing, hosting and managing an enterprise storage platform is costly and complex. Even with the most advanced capacity planning, predicting what you need and when you need it is a challenge and often results in large capital expenditure, just when you don’t need it. K3 Hosting’s Storage as a Service (STaaS) is a unique Private Cloud Service. It provides our customers with an on-premise or off-premise storage platform charged as a service, the aim being to align IT spend with data consumption. You pay monthly per GB of storage used with the ability to scale up and down not just with capacity but also with performance as your business needs change. All our storage and optimization technology is built on open standards, supporting heterogeneous storage environments with multiple operating platforms from a variety of vendors. Our solutions integrate within your environment to enhance your current IT investments and speed both deployment and time to value.

Q
What does the Networking-as-a-Service product cover?

A
Our core products in this Service Pillar are Bandwidth on Demand, MPLS Connectivity, Wireless, WAN optimization and Security.

Q
Hardware-as-a-Service is quite a general title – what are
the specifics?

A
K3 Hosting’s Hardware as a Service, also known as (HaaS), provides your business with the ability to provide a complete end-to-end managed service solution, which can include anything necessary to bring a client’s network into today’s technology. This can include servers, desktops, notebooks, infrastructure components, licensing, and much more, all in a monthly, recurring revenue based solution, with no up-front costs.

This Service Pillar is stacked with options for our customers, from Managed Print Solutions to rental and Leasing and also includes Asset Management and disposal.

Q
Are some of these services more popular than others
right now?

Our core Service Pillars have and always will be at the forefront of what we deliver to our customers but our most popular pillars currently are Storage, Disaster Recovery and Hardware Services.

Q
What has been the general uptake of what, for many, is a new
way of sourcing their IT resource?

A
The response we have had from our customers, partners and peers has been extremely encouraging and the uptake is considerable we are welcoming around four new customers per week and that is growing. Our consultative approach and flexibility make for a unique customer experience as we cut through the jargon and listen to what our customers and partners are saying and then delivering a solution tailored to them.

Q
What are the questions customers should ask for when trying to
assess different as-a-Service offerings?
A
The list is endless but of course we have to keep things succinct and to the point to avoid any confusion. The key thing to consider when assessing cloud and the multitude of service offerings: How will it improve my current operation and what benefits will it bring to my business?

Q
What do they need to consider when deciding between keeping
IT in-house and moving to a Cloud/managed environment?

A
There are many things to consider when comparing on premise against cloud and of course you can also have a hybrid of the two but typically it comes down to some key areas. A great place to start is asking yourself what are my priorities? For example if your goal is to shift more of your IT cost centre from a capital expense to an operational expense, the PAYG model is a good choice. However, if your organization requires direct control over physical assets and operational personnel, a solution which is on premise may work for you. Whilst it seems like a mine field of questions and answers and decisions to make, it is really quite simple and that’s where K3 Hosting can provide the best very best advice and the options to enable our customers to take bite size chunks and have complete flexibility in their model.

Q
How do you interface with customers – direct or do you have
a Channel strategy in place?

A
Partners are an integral part of our core growth strategy: delivering enterprise IT infrastructure services while bringing industry knowledge, system integration and/or technology expertise to clients all over the world.

Q
What can we expect from K3 Hosting during 2014 – some
new offerings – for example, Security-as-a-Service?

A
We have some very exciting extensions to our current service pillars in 2014 and beyond and will continue to expand each with services that will benefit our customers and give even greater improvements to their operations.

Can you tell us a little bit about your international hosting initiative?
We have customers all over the world connected to ‘local’ data centres and we only see this expanding greatly over the coming months and years, with additional focus in emerging areas with high demand for our services such as Asia and Africa.