For many years organizations in East Africa have faced the challenges of limited connectivity and expensive “fly-in” organizations setting up a variety of systems. These systems typically fell into disrepair as support and upgrades were not part of the arrangement.

In 2008, the Quintica Board of Directors voted to invest in providing hosted services to the businesses of Kenya and East Africa. Kenya business leaders need quality service providers to help them drive their business profitability and growth in the dynamic East African marketplace.

The investment decision also represented the next logical step for Quintica who have for many years advised, consulted and trained IT professionals on the importance of customer based, service orientated systems. The investment was labeled “Fusion” – a joining of best practice consulting, training and technology into a world class service offering.

Planning began in late 2008 to build a data centre facility in Nairobi, Kenya and by July 2009 the centre was running and providing our first offering to pilot customers. The core premise of this facility is to deliver Managed Services utilising Quintica’s infrastructure and managed using best practice expertise. The result is that clients can benefit from high-performance service aligned technology at a reduced cost and human overhead.

Naturally the first offering for any such facility influences client perceptions. For this reason it was decided that the Microsoft Hosted Messaging and Collaboration had to be the first to market offering, due to the robust nature of the solution and the worldwide acceptance of Microsoft as a quality solutions business.

Project Scope

The project brief for the Kenya operation was to construct a managed data centre in Nairobi that would house the necessary infrastructure to commence hosted and managed service operations within budget and on time. The phase approach for the centre is to create combination of high end data class application servers, enterprise class storage and utilising Microsoft’s Hyper-V virtualisation platform for managing multiple virtual servers that deliver the complete communications service platform, in a multi-tenancy environment. The following phase overview illustrates the structure approach to the creation of this facility:

Phase 1 - Identify key vendors and products for best-of-breed hosted services.

Selected key vendors and partners are DELL, EMC, CISCO, Microsoft, BMC and Symantec. It was decided to implement a full virtualized solution in order to maximize resource usage and application availability, and minimize capital expenditure.

The virtualization technology selected was Microsoft’s Hyper-V to maximize compatibility with the selected Microsoft platform. DELL was selected to provide all servers, KVM switches and racks. The selected storage solution was an EMC CX-4 CLARiiON FC storage array. The networking partner selected was CISCO, providing firewalls, switches and core switches.

On the software side, Quintica identified Microsoft as the key software vender on which to base the majority of its offerings and signed an HVS and SPLA agreement with Microsoft, allowing Quintica to offer the full suite of Microsoft services to the market.

BMC will provide the Service Desk solution, Remedy for incident and change management. Symantec was selected as the partner for backup and vaulting services, as well as premium client security services.

Once the vendors were identified, it was then possible to architect and design the complete solution, and identify required resources and skill sets, and implementation partners as required.

The final solution design caters for 15,000 subscribers, scalable into the millions, consisting of 12 high-end physical servers hosting 41 virtual servers. The solution is fully redundant, and highly scalable, with a “no downtime design” for server and software upgrades.

Phase 2 – Platform Design and Implementation

The first solution implemented is the Microsoft Hosted Messaging and Collaboration 4.5, delivering hosted Exchange (email, calendaring, tasks and contacts), hosted SharePoint (document management, collaboration portal) and hosted Communication Services (instant messaging, Live Meeting, A/V Conferencing).

As well as implementing the service offering it was necessary to design and implement the required support technology. This required the installation and customization of the Service Management suite of products from BMC (Service Desk, Change Management, Configuration Management, and Service Level Management). The Symantec products were also deployed to ensure rigorous data protection and security.

Importantly was the requirement to design operational and second level support processes and procedures that created a focus on ensuring high availability of internal systems, but also focused on the importance of a quality customer experience.

Phase 3 – Looking to the Future

Already catered for in the initial design is the expansion and addition of new services. These include the ability to provide hosted call centers and additional Microsoft based services, including Hosted Dynamics CRM, Archiving and Vaulting of messages, and Managed Infrastructure solutions based on Microsoft System Center technologies.

Part of the expansion will include the roll out of a new provisioning platform that will enable customers and resellers to directly manage their subscribed mailboxes and customers, without Quintica staff intervention; this effectively allows Quintica to give control of usage to those customers who want that level of control.

Quintica are also implementing Site Operations Service; smart location solutions utilizing Quintica’s operations center for all aspects of remote sites monitoring and management. This facility will include monitoring and management of building systems and even customers data centre and “critical room” environments, covering energy (including GenSet fuel levels) temperature, humidity, security, fire protection and the associated alerts and escalations.

Quintica will also be launching Backup-as-a-Service allowing customers to backup their critical data to Quintica’s secure storage (including laptops and desktops).

Ongoing

The solutions offered by Quintica will undergo ongoing optimization and improvement. Seamless upgrades to new products such as Exchange 2010, SharePoint Server 2010, Communication Server 2010, as well as the ability to offer Microsoft Office 2010 from a hosted environment will provide our clients access to the very latest and most advanced technology available.

Summary

• Quintica makes available Microsoft solutions that business requires in order to improve their ability to operate in an increasingly competitive Kenyan and East African marketplace.

• The solutions offered from a hosted facility create a no CAPEX investment which financial controllers prefer.

• Quintica provides a complete solution from training, data migration and high availability of service, backed by disciplined process to ensure continual operation and protection of valuable data.

• Fusion from Quintica delivers world class solutions for companies that do not have or do not want the budget, time and technical skill set required to deploy top end Microsoft solutions.

About Quintica

Quintica operates throughout Africa and the Middle East combining specialist technology, best practice Service Management consulting, accredited training programs and hosted services that focus on how to support customers, save costs and optimize available cash.

The Quintica business pillars of People, Process, Product and Partners drive strategic and operational business improvements in Customer service, Cash optimization and Cost reduction. Quintica recognises the value of combining “best practice” (ITIL®, CoBIT, ISO/IEC 20000, Six Sigma) service management solutions, consulting, education and managed services using a collaborative and consultative approach.