How Infrastructure Choices Affect Service Provider Business Outcomes 

According to IDC Canada, the Canadian infrastructure outsourcing market is set to grow by almost $130 million by the end of 2016, with revenues of over $9.5 billion.

The Service Provider Difference

Although service providers (SPs) offer access to servers, storage, and networking to deliver their anything-as-a-service model, their infrastructure needs differ from enterprise users in several key ways.

SPs must deliver at cloud scale, thus requiring they have capacity at the ready to handle the rapidly changing demands of a multi-tenancy environment. For example, if a gaming company client’s game goes viral, the ability to adapt to a sudden surge in demand can make the difference between profit and loss.

Failure isn’t an option for SPs, and that extends to their infrastructure. Since users demand increasingly higher service level agreements (SLAs) with financial penalties, SPs require infrastructure that offers the same level of reliability as a landline telephone dial tone or users will flee to other providers.

From a financial perspective, service provider CFOs take a different view of infrastructure, since the IT they deploy is part of their cost of goods rather than operating expense. Every dollar spent on SP infrastructure is not a profit dollar, and that price sensitivity extends to operating costs such as power and cooling.

Meeting the Challenge

What defines the perfect SP infrastructure? Certainly cost is a critical factor. However, there is a strong argument that flexibility is even more critical. The ability to move workloads across parts of IT infrastructure is an important piece of the equation, subsuming some workloads to meet demand for other, higher-priority ones.

Flexibility of service offerings is also key, so the time to market for new services is as low as possible. Getting new offerings to market faster is a significant differentiator for an SP to be considered a competitive leader.

Finding partners who offer flexibility also matters. SPs need infrastructure providers who can offer flexible financing, who have flexible teams offering support and expertise tailored to their needs, and who can deliver flexible capacity on demand to meet both steady growth and seasonal peaks.

Recognizing the growing importance of service providers, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has crafted several offerings designed specifically with SPs in mind. These SP Ready Solutions help ensure key functionality like multi-tenancy, end-user portals, lifecycle management, billing integration, automation, and orchestration are available to assist in ‘as-a-Service’ delivery.

To learn more about HPE’s entire portfolio for businesses built on delivering anything-as-a-service, click here.

Chris Christianopoulos is Director, Strategic Partners and Service Providers at HPE Canada.