PROACTIS gets proactive with £1.8m Redcentric private cloud  

UK cloud services provider Redcentric has signed a £1.8m private cloud deal with UK eProcurement solutions company PROACTIS to offer the ISV more direct control of its hosted infrastructure and give its hundreds of UK customers the option of faster disaster recovery.

Delivering cloud eProcurement to many of the UK’s best known brands in both commercial and not-for-profit sectors, PROACTIS wanted the new private infrastructure to guarantee a within four-hours return to operation (RTO) in the event of an issue within its primary systems. This is a critical value add expected by more and more of its customers.

“As an early cloud adopter we already supported thousands of users on a robust and secure Software-as-a-Service platform,” said Sean McDonough, COO, PROACTIS. “As the cloud has matured, customers’ demands and expectations have matched this progression, now the infrastructure behind the software often receives equal, if not more scrutiny than the software. Some businesses by their very nature have a requirement for superior levels of disaster recovery provision and greater controls of data, and we have a duty to deliver upon that.

“We were confident that Redcentric, as our existing cloud provider, could deliver the additional recovery and security we required,” McDonough continued. “Moving quickly on this project has already allowed us to secure business where a guaranteed ‘within four-hours’ RTO was essential to the deal and we’re confident that Redcentric will deliver ROI quickly enabling many more market opportunities where a world class infrastructure differentiates us from the competition.”

Beyond disaster recovery PROACTIS has also invested in a private cloud to be able to gain more hands on control of its infrastructure. It wanted to retain the ability to internally manage customer data in the cloud, while still realising the benefits of using Redcentric’s state of the art data centre and SLAs.

PROACTIS has worked with Redcentric to deliver cloud solutions for nearly a decade, beginning as a co-location customer in 2006 then quickly adopting Infrastructure as a Service soon after Redcentric introduced it.

“PROACTIS is a great example of a well operated cloud ISV, clearly focused on developing best-in-class software while recognising that it needs to lead its industry in terms of the technical architecture underpinning it,” said Andy Mills, Group Sales Director from Redcentric. “We’re seeing more and more ISVs come to Redcentric in search of similarly robust solutions.”