By Michael Johnson, Victorian Sales Manager
Most channel partners that have been around for any length of time have no doubt seen their businesses evolve in an effort to continue reinventing themselves as the customers they serve embrace transformative technology. In the same way their customers are constantly evolving in a highly competitive and disruptive business environment, channel partners have also had to find new ways of staying nimble while continuing to differentiate their value within a heavily congested and fiercely competitive ICT industry.
NEXTDC’s ecosystem is vast and rich in expertise. Despite being fiercely competitive, so many of our partners are thriving based on the value they bring to their customers through innovation and experience, placing unwavering importance on delivering exceptional customer outcomes. One partner who continues to blaze a trail in the channel is Melbourne-based Blue Connections.
Partnerships at the core
We live and breathe a channel-first ethos at NEXTDC, which essentially means we place our strategic channel partnerships at the heart of our business. NEXTDC may provide the infrastructure platform that powers the digital era, but it’s our ICT partners like Blue Connections who provide the critical services and expertise that allows customers to innovate and thrive.
It’s our ecosystem that truly brings our world-class infrastructure to life, and it is partners like Blue Connections that are connecting Australian organisations to the incredible opportunities afforded by cloud computing and connectivity, among other things, in the digital era. Our data centres are just one piece of a complex IT puzzle. The end to end value of technology and the infrastructure platform that supports it really comes to light when the expertise of our partners is merged with the physical environment it needs to thrive – forming a truly optimised hybrid IT strategy.
Like many Australian organisations, technology partners have their own set of unique challenges when it comes to not only staying competitive but maintaining a hefty advantage in the value chain. Not only are they under pressure from larger, global organisations that can add value with scale, they need to keep their eyes firmly peeled for new disruptors who pop up ever more frequently, with fresh approaches and a hunger to out-manoeuvre the incumbents.
Nowadays, when customers come to conversations to work out what solutions are best for them, they are armed with 70% of the information they need to make a decision. Given they generally know what they want, where they see true value is through professional expertise and guidance that help them make the right solution choices first time.
The value in being “Always on”
Colocation gives Blue Connections a new dimension of flexibility, enabling them to focus on innovation and driving exemplary customer outcomes. Flexible connectivity and close proximity to the major public clouds creates unprecedented opportunity for Blue Connections to customise its solutions so they meet the needs of their clients’ hybrid and multi-cloud architectures.
It means they can rapidly and efficiently extend hybrid configurations, build robust business continuity plans around them and manage intelligent, omni-channel WANs. Together, this serves to ensure their customers always have access to the critical systems at the back end of their business processes from anywhere at any time.
Amongst the growing concerns from customers around how they manage their infrastructure more optimally, Blue Connections find themselves increasingly challenged by customers to demonstrate its integrity with regards to best practice around environmental sustainability, security and business continuity planning. These are now critical components for larger, more complex deployments, which can be difficult to build, justify and support long-term without the right partnerships.
Blue Connections partnered with NEXTDC and turned what was traditionally unachievable for partners, into an everyday best practise. Something Blue Connections deliver, unwaveringly, in every customer solution delivered. Colocating hybrid solutions within NEXTDC’s world-class data centres means Blue Connections manage these requirements at scale, to the highest global standards all whilst optimising cost.
Critical infrastructure within our facilities enables Blue Connections to assure customers their IT is operating at the best possible energy efficiency levels while also meeting all regulatory compliance for data sovereignty and risk management around redundancy, back-up and disaster recovery.
Ready to expand SD-WAN services
With customers in multiple locations and spread across Australia, Blue Connections continue to move the needle for their customers, focussing on delivering voice and data networks that are affordable, resilient and centrally managed. Using SD-WAN technology and tapping into the wider connected ecosystem of carriers and wholesale managed services providers, Blue Connections has become synonymous for architecting intelligent WANs for clients.
These are secure, aggregated services that reduce overall connectivity costs and the number of providers billing their customers. They also allow for the introduction of fully redundant back-up pathways including alternative wired and/or wireless services that can be activated at a moment’s notice all of which is consolidated into a single visibility pane for efficient monitoring of service.
Where customer needs dictate, Blue Connections architect extremely high bandwidth links from within the data centre allowing large volumes of data to flow quickly from legacy infrastructure to public clouds and back again with almost zero latency from any two points in the country.
As Blue Connections’ customers continue to embrace the megatrends that are driving the depth and breadth of workloads, the volumes of data being transferred require ever more attention to be paid to the level of security, business continuity and power efficiency that is critical as the depth and breadth of its customer workloads continue to grow exponentially under the influence of megatrends such as AI, virtual reality and the Internet of Things.
Developing consistently exceptional solutions
As Blue Connections strives to continue delivering exceptional solutions to customers, premium data centre services offer new and innovative ways for them to create value. At the end of the day, customers want to make sure their IT infrastructure is fit-for-purpose, always on, secure and creating value within their organisation without any unexpected cost blowouts as the world we operate in continues to change rapidly.
One thing they have learned over their years, is the best way to achieve this is to always be at the coalface of technology and to partner with best-of-breed suppliers that enable them to develop custom solutions that surpass the growing requirements of their customers.
To connect with Blue Connections and learn more about the unprecedented value they continue to deliver their customers Australia-wide, check them out in Cloud Centre.
