Rapidfire makes the plunge with IBM’s SmartCloud Enterprise

Queensland-based IT business and IBM business partner, Rapidfire, has transferred its software development and research and development operations to IBM’s SmartCloud Enterprise platform.

While IBM Cloud platform, SmartCloud Enterprise, was originally launched in May 2010 in the US and deployed across six datacentres in the world, it was implemented in Singapore for the Asia region in mid-2011.

After it was launched in Australia to IBM’s business partner community in July 2011, Rapidfire was the first local IBM partner to adopt it and has been using it since August.

“We needed to offer our customers solutions that would integrate globally and with certain limitations faced with infrastructure in Australia, and the Cloud was the best option to give us greater access, reliability and performance internationally,” Rapidfire general manager, Scott Hunter, said.

Having successfully used SmartCloud Enterprise for the entire time, Rapidfire will move its new and existing clients over to the platform.

“The other Cloud options that we looked at before SmartCloud Enterprise were still local, and the advantage we had being an IBM business partner already was that we could leverage IBM’s global presence as well,” Hunter said.

“Having datacentres in multiple international sites allowed us to deliver true disaster recovery and greater redundancy for ourselves and our customers.”

As for why Rapidfire made the choice to be an early adopter with IBM’s Cloud platform, Hunter attributes the move to the company having projects that needed deployment and a solution to assist with that.

“We did perform a great deal of testing with the IBM guys to test functionality of SmartCloud Enterprise,” he said.

“It really was the best way to offer the services we needed globally for the projects we had online.”

The benefit for Rapidfire being one of the early adopters has meant that the company has received “a great deal of attention” from IBM, which Hunter feels has been “fantastic”.

“You don’t often get a lot of vendor buy-in, so we’ve loved being able to work more closely with IBM to provide better solutions than we would have been able to with other partners in the past,” he says.

IBM global technology services global Cloud sales and strategy VP, Virginie Haas, said SmartCloud Enterprise came about following IBM’s acknowledgement that the Cloud has gone mainstream in the IT market.

“Some businesses will have the ability to build your own capability, but this will be a big investment, so others will find partners that are in a situation to provide this capability,” she says.

“We wanted to be in a situation to offer both, so we either support those partners that want to build those capabilities, or we will offer them this platform that we can integrate, resell and add value on.”

Haas adds that with SmartCloud Enterprise, IBM is also providing its partners with a platform that they can “easily resell or integrate.”

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