– Greg Nares, Director of Sales Engineering forFiberMedia Group, LLC, a leading data center services provider with facilities throughout the New York metropolitan area and Cleveland, OH, recently sat down for an interview to discuss industry trends and how their service offerings provide a competitive edge.
Explain the types of solutions that FiberMedia offers?
FiberMedia provides Intelligent Data Center Solutions to enterprise customers. Intelligent Data Center Solutions seamlessly deliver both the resiliency and security of physical infrastructure and the flexibility and cost-effectiveness of the Cloud. The company’s data centers are strategically located in six markets offering both primary and disaster recovery/business continuity services. Locations include Secaucus NJ, Westchester NY, Manhattan NY, Brooklyn NY, Jersey City NJ, and Cleveland OH.
FiberMedia’s services are tailored to our client’s specific needs. Whether the client is looking to take an existing colocation environment and wants FiberMedia to take care of physical environment or a client has a Software as a Service (SaaS) environment and wants FiberMedia to run the OS and database layer, FiberMedia has a tailored solution to meet those needs. FiberMedia’s offerings can be as simple and straightforward as colocation with metered power or as comprehensive as a fully managed offering. This flexibility and focus on client needs is what makes FiberMedia a partner you can rely upon.
How are your solutions different from other offerings available in the market?
There are a wide range of offerings in the market from purely hosted Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) to companies that offer just colocation services. Along this spectrum, FiberMedia is ideally positioned to be able to offer the types of services and capabilities that allow our clients to maintain control of the applications and functions they deem necessary and offload those functions that aren’t a core competency.
Our hybrid solutions have the ability to provide a current colocation customer, whose equipment may be End Of Life (EoL), a migration path to the Cloud by providing an on ramp from our SSAE 16 certified data centers. At the hardware’s EoL, the client can create a virtual machine in the Cloud and seamlessly continue to have compute power. This can be done through a single contract and single bill and the services are tailored to our customer’s exacting requirements.
What enhancements, if any, will be made to FiberMedia’s offerings?
We continually seek ways to enhance and upgrade our existing platform, and it will remain at core of our offerings. FiberMedia will continue to add the data center facilities and capabilities that its clients need to succeed.
Portal Enhancements
Self-Management– We currently offer support and management from our existing customer portal and are looking to introduce self-management capabilities such as the ability to increase or decrease committed bandwidth, vCPU, vRAM, and increase storage. Subscribers will also be able to add/remove additional VM’s for bursting. We also plan to provide a catalog of standard VM images that clients will be able to access through the portal to implement for specific deployment needs. Finally, we plan to allow clients to create their own VM images, based on their specific requirements.
Enhanced Visibility– We are looking to provide clients with enhanced visibility into their environment via a “single pane of glass” viewing capability. This is a capability that many business customers are looking for and a capability we believe will benefit our clients. It will provide a bird’s eye view into both the client’s internal and external platforms – all done through a single tool.
In January of this year, we launched our AcceleratePartner Program, and since then the response has been great. Our partners will now have access to a turnkey solution that will allow them to brand our IaaS portal management, and we at FiberMedia will take care of the back end support, billing. This will allow our partners to seamlessly offer high quality Cloud services to their end users with the confidence of knowing that these services are backed by FiberMedia’s years of experience.
What trends are you seeing in Cloud services, data center colocation and hybrid solutions?
From the technology perspective, the sector has matured in many ways, and we’re seeing that instead of proprietary ways of working with a Cloud provider or platform, the industry is starting to open up and share. Whether OpenStack or CloudStack, there is a lot of activity in normalizing and using a common language on the platform side, which is allowing adoption of the Cloud to grow and extend rather than creating silos.
While we are still seeing growth on the Cloud and colocation side, we aren’t seeing a lot of providers taking advantage of hybrid capabilities. You see many Cloud providers allowing for cross connects, but they haven’t opened their doors. While that is a step in the right direction, it is not as effective as having your servers physically colocated in the same place as the Cloud. When it comes to the hybrid solutions, we want to push ourselves because we have the ability to offer the compelling solutions that benefit mid-sized to large enterprises. We are looking to put smaller nodes out in more locations.
On the colocation side, we are seeing that it is becoming somewhat commoditized. However, options such as our FlexColo service are continuing to gain traction in the market. We’re seeing more and more requests for metered power from customers, especially from those customers requiring less than 10 cabinets. This is fueling our growth.
We hear a lot about “Cloud”. From your perspective what is the Cloud and what are the benefits of a Cloud-based Solution?
Many service providers use the term “Cloud” and that has created a lot of confusion in the market as to what “Cloud” really is and what services are part of the Cloud. FiberMedia provides Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). From our perspective, the Cloud is more of a utility type offering where you are turning up services through an online portal, and we view that as a “low touch” means of service. With that type of approach there is not a lot of hand holding, and perhaps not a lot of support provided to the client. FiberMedia provides our client base a trusted partner to work with and more of a consultative approach to design. We provide more hand holding from a solution perspective and our designs are backed by years of experience offering these types of solutions. Our clients confidently trust us to manage their environment, and that trust is not misplaced.
What are some important factors that should be considered when sourcing data center colocation, Cloud, and hybrid solutions?
Some things to consider include asking the following questions:
· Are you working with a partner that you can trust?
· Is the provider working with you towards a common goal?
· Are the people you are interacting with in the pre-sales process going to be the same ones you work with post sale?
· Can this provider adapt and evolve as your needs change, and do they offer the breadth of services you need to efficiently operate your environment?
· Can the provider offer you a custom tailored solution designed to support your needs?
At FiberMedia, we take the time to understand your needs and business challenges and design a custom tailored solution that will support your organization today and into the future. We don’t build out cages and power in advance and force fit our clients into a standard configuration. Because of this approach, we have the ability to build a custom hybrid environment dedicated to a client. The solution could encompass colocation, Cloud with dedicated hardware and virtual machines and dedicated storage components. Our approach is all about flexibility and customization that provides our clients with the infrastructure necessary to succeed.
Another key factor is data center location. FiberMedia’s data centers are strategically located throughout the New York Metropolitan and Cleveland areas making FiberMedia an attractive choice for businesses. From a backup perspective, our Clevelanddata center is an ideal site to support our northeast footprint, and we have strong connectivity between our data centers to ensure a seamless transition should it be required.
What would you say to companies interested in the types of solutions FiberMedia offers but haven’t yet contacted FiberMedia?
FiberMedia has been the one-source infrastructure support solution for mid-sized and large enterprise clients in financial services, healthcare, media and IT for more than a decade. Our clients rely on our highly secure, redundant network of strategically located data centers offering geographic diversity and enhanced protection, each one designed to function as both a primary and disaster recovery site.
If you are looking for a trusted provider that will put your interests first as well as one that is capable of providing a full breadth of managed services, and if you are looking for a provider that is offering a solid data center environment backed by high quality service and support, then look no further FiberMedia is the data center provider for you.
Working with FiberMedia, you are not going to get “lost in the in the shuffle”. At FiberMedia, we take a consultative approach and work with you one-on-one to understand your needs and design a solution best suited to support your organization.
Taking a consultative approach, providing high quality service and support and earning your trust – that’s what FiberMedia is all about.
What’s next for FiberMedia?
Today FiberMedia is a regional company with great financial partners. We plan to build on this solid foundation to expand our physical footprint nationally and continue to grow our suite of services either organically or through partnerships with best-in-class providers. From colocation to managed services as well as on the Cloud side, you’ll see enhancements throughout 2013 and beyond. The team is focused on getting to the next level, and that growth is right at our door step.
Where can prospects learn more about FiberMedia?
For more information on FiberMedia, please visit our website at www.fibermedia.net or by following FiberMedia on Twitter and LinkedIn.
