ASG Technologies Accelerates Its SaaS Road Map With Hitachi Vantara Cloud Services

As software provisioning models evolve, ASG strives to provide its customers with as much choice and flexibility as possible. “A lot of our customers ask us to support their digital transformations,” explained Tish Dawson, Senior Financial Analyst at ASG. “Embracing software as a service is often a key part of their change agenda.”

To meet the changing needs of its customers, ASG launched a new SaaS offering based on its existing product portfolio, which has attracted more than 3,500 organizations in 60 countries. “We needed to scale up our infrastructure resources to support our SaaS capabilities and ensure a seamless experience for customers,” commented Stephen Bell, Director of Datacenter Services at ASG.

ASG had already invested in Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), a managed service, to support its development activities. Now, it needed to bring greater governance to its use of the public cloud, as well as to expand capacity. “We had a tight timeline to launch our new SaaS offerings and that meant we had a tight timeline to optimize the underlying cloud platform,” said Bell. “We also wanted to ensure we applied industry best practices to maximize the security and availability of workloads running in the cloud.”

The Solution: Simplify the Implementation and Configuration of Additional Cloud Resources

To supplement its internal skills, ASG decided to partner with Hitachi Vantara, leveraging its Cloud Consulting Services. “We met with Hitachi Vantara at AWS Re:invent and were interested in the collaborative and agile project method they proposed. The approach corresponded to ASG’s practices. It allowed us to start fast and simultaneously take the time required to truly transfer the knowledge to ASG stakeholders,” explained ASG Technologies’ Head of SaaS Solutions, Patrick Wolf.

The Hitachi Vantara team evaluated ASG’s existing cloud resources and helped implement the AWS Landing Zone solution, which simplifies the creation and management of multi-account multi-region environments through the use of automation.

By leveraging the Secure Cloud Computing Architecture (SCCA) from the United States’ Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), the Hitachi Vantara team was able to expand these automation capabilities but also apply industry standards and blueprints when configuring the AWS Landing Zone.

ASG, which employs over 1,000 people at more than 40 offices around the world, will eventually run seven accounts under the AWS Landing Zone infrastructure to support production, test and development workloads. The Hitachi Vantara team helped to ensure the accounts had security and network baselines based on best practices to safeguard customer information and cloud resources.

“By working with Hitachi Vantara’s cloud services consultants, we were able to stay on track with project timelines, communications, expectations and action items,” said Mike Chiaramonte, a project manager at ASG. “The team helped to solve some critical technical issues that could have derailed the entire project.”

The Outcome: New SaaS Portfolio Boosts Competitive Advantage

ASG now has the flexible infrastructure foundations it needs to launch a compelling and cost-effective SaaS offering to existing and new customers.

“SaaS cost models can be difficult to define and manage,” explained Dawson. “The team at Hitachi Vantara provided guidance on how to develop a pricing framework that would ensure customers were only billed for the cloud resources they used.”

The partnership with Hitachi Vantara also helped ASG to remove cost and complexity from the implementation and configuration of its new cloud environments.

“With Hitachi Vantara’s cloud services, we were able to avoid any expensive rework costs of the AWS Landing Zones,” said Wolf. “The partnership helped to accelerate our SaaS road map, which will be key for boosting competitive advantage and growth.”

By expanding its portfolio to include an SaaS offering, ASG will be able to help more customers achieve their digitalization ambitions. “By embracing SaaS, organizations can democratize IT and accelerate their time to value,” concluded Wolf.