Maclean Technology, a division of Noel Leeming Group is offering free migration to its new managed cloud service, SmartCore, in an effort to help small and medium kiwi businesses overcome traditional barriers to moving to the cloud.
Labelled ‘Free-for-Three’, customers who commit to a three-year term will benefit from free migration to the new service.
Chris Maclean, General Manager of Services for the Noel Leeming Group says one of the biggest barriers NZ SMEs face in adopting cloud server technology is typically the project migration cost.
“Moving into or out of a hosted environment takes a significant amount of IT expertise to design, build and transition to or from it - and that’s where the contracts become less of an issue than the practicality of moving,” he says.
“‘Free-for-Three’ is a unique offer which combines our 20 years of expertise in managing on-premise server environments with our latest cloud offering to help customers make the move without having to face a significant capital project cost.
“This offer is the culmination of everything we’ve learned customers want. It’s a step up from what a medium-sized business would typically build itself on premise, it is competitively priced, has built-in back up and disaster recovery options, and it’s based right here in New Zealand.”
Maclean says Maclean Technology is positioning itself as one of only a few full-service IT providers addressing mid-sized companies across the country.
“There’s plenty of cloud providers, IT support providers and data connection providers in New Zealand,” Maclean adds.
“But there’s very few who can take full responsibility for an issue regardless of the root cause – whether it be user education, the desktop computer, the local network, the connection to the data centre or the servers in the data centre itself.
“SmartCore allows us to complete the picture, which eradicates any delays in resolving issues.
“Our mission is to help kiwi companies grow unconstrained by their technology, and by investing in helping companies move to the cloud we are then able to provide an end-to-end service, from the cloud to the desktop, that we are extremely confident in.
“Put simply, it means a more reliable IT system for customers, and in the event of an unavoidable outage we can resolve it faster than ever.”
Maclean says the company has built the service based on web-scale, hyper-converged technology from Nutanix.
“We see Nutanix as a core partner in our cloud venture,” he adds. “As well as offering outstanding technical statistics, the technology is exceptionally scalable, meaning we can easily and quickly grow the system as required to meet customer demand.
Commenting on expected demand, Maclean says the company already has early adopters for the service including existing Maclean customers and parent firm Noel Leeming Group.
“This level of interest has endorsed our strategy in building the service without compromise to ensure the best possible result for SmartCore tenants,” he adds.
Echoing Maclean’s comments, Simon Kennedy, CIO for The Warehouse Group, the publicly-listed owner of Noel Leeming says the SmartCore environment brings an “excellent new deployment option” to the entire group.
“We’re very excited about the possibilities this brings to both the group and its commercial customers,” he says.
“I’d challenge any IT Manager, that isn’t already, to think about cloud. The argument for it is so strong now, and we hope our offer will help those who want to, but couldn’t afford to get there, make the transition.”