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As more and more midmarket companies look to virtualization as a cost-effective solution to business IT challenges, an increasing selection of vendors are offering services geared at small and medium-size businesses. Doyenz’s Automated Virtual IT, a managed service for IT consultants that leverages virtualization and cloud services to automate the delivery and management of IT infrastructure, is no exception.
Designed to improve the quality and efficiency of SMB IT, Doyenz’s comprehensive SAAS (software-as-a-service) platform can be used to automatically configure and manage servers and desktops as virtual appliances. The company calls Automated Virtual IT a “hybrid solution” that can be used to deploy virtual appliances either on-premises or in the cloud, allowing seamless migration from one to the other.
The new solution offers unparalleled business continuity and uptime to SMBs at a lower cost, and a new IT services delivery model with better profits to the IT consultant who serves them, according to the company. SMB IT challenges, according to Doyenz, include dealing with disparate systems offering limited backup and disaster recovery, and SMBs rely on IT consultants who operate in a “break-fix model” and struggle to provide high-quality service without the right tools and technology.
Built on the Doyenz Automated Virtual IT Platform, the Doyenz Automated Virtual IT service is an SAAS subscription offering that requires no hardware or software investment, which helps IT consultants build a recurring repeatable revenue stream and grow their profits, while lowering costs and improving service to their SMB customers.
“Doyenz has developed a managed services platform that enables life cycle management of virtual appliances in a complete solution to the SMB,” said IDC research analyst Brett Waldman. “It provides many of the benefits of virtualization and virtual appliances to the SMB, including disaster recovery and fault tolerance, without the need to learn new management skills by leveraging channel partners and the cloud.”
Doyenz hopes Automated Virtual IT will address these SMB challenges by enabling IT consultants to leverage automation, virtualization and cloud services to remotely configure, test, deploy and manage their customers’ servers as virtual appliances. The Automated Virtual IT managed service’s capabilities include an automated creation and deployment of new servers with best practices, a virtual test-lab with the latest copy of the production server for testing (patches and upgrades), and performing complex operations such as migrations with limited or no production downtime.
Other service capabilities Automated Virtual IT offers are remote monitoring and management of Tier 1 alerts and automated off-site disaster recovery with local fail-over on premises or in the cloud.
“Doyenz gives me no-touch local failover and disaster recovery, which is critical for my clients in Florida’s hurricane country,” said Bonnye Westphal of 3TechZ, a Tallahassee-based IT support firm. “The ability to manage my client’s SBS servers remotely saves me hours of driving all over town, which saves my clients money and helps increase my profits. I also finally get a chance to take advantage of virtualization, using a cloud service that makes my life easier and dramatically improves my ability to take care of my customers.”
While Doyenz does not host the customer’s production environment, the Doyenz-generated virtual appliances can run either on the customer’s premises or hosted in the cloud, providing the bridge required by the SMB.
“We are very excited to be introducing Automated Virtual IT to the market,” said company CEO Ashutosh Tiwary. “We are enabling the SMB and their IT consultants to harness the new IT economy to transform the quality and efficiency of SMB IT, and create a more profitable and cost-efficient business model for the IT consultant.”
Tiwary said the company’s value proposition is simple. “We want customers to pay less for their IT and our partners to make more profits,” he said. “We accomplish this by leveraging technologies like virtualization, automation and cloud services to make the delivery of IT cheaper, faster and better.”
Doyenz has received angel funding from private investors such as Microsoft and Google, and is now seeking Series A funding to support growth and escalating market demand.