Logicalis leading with Cisco

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Sinead Kelly, Sales Manager, IT Express, a division of for Logicalis

15 June 2015

At Logicalis, we believe the best way to help our customers make the most of their technology investment is by partnering with trusted world-class vendors like Cisco. By marrying their innovation with our skills in ICT service and delivery, we can support our customers in achieving better business outcomes and improved organisational performance.

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Our intention is to build and grow our Cisco business in Ireland and we have taken a series of steps to put this into action. The agreement signed last year was part of an overall investment of more than €1 million into expanding our workforce here. Within a month of signing of the partnership, our Irish operation was promoted to Cisco Premier Partner status, both because of the investment and our appointment of key Cisco-focused technical, sales and support consultants.

More recently still, Logicalis appointed me as Cisco Alliance Manager. I have extensive knowledge of the Irish market and experience over a 20-year career covers IT and telecommunications, technical, consulting, sales and senior management. This makes me the ideal choice to continue Logicalis’ leadership position in the networking, data centre compute and collaboration markets, and to continue delivering some of Ireland’s largest ICT transformation projects, as it has done over the last 25 years.

In a relatively short period of time, Logicalis has become one of the few Cisco partners in Ireland with real pedigree in data centres and mobility. We span the range of data centre design and build activities, from transforming an organisation’s current data centre right through to planning and building new data centres from the ground up. We’re particularly interested in working with customers that would have typically had their communications run separately to their core IT functions.

Today, we continue to increase our technical expertise nationwide with further recruitment. We have also further developed our portfolio of strategic business partnerships with a range of other leading technology vendors. Whether in the category of mobility, enterprise networks, converged private cloud or security, Logicalis has the capability to deliver major ICT change projects from architecture and design through to implementation and support, and from data centres at the core of an organisation’s ICT infrastructure, to mobile devices at the edge.

“Surveys show enabling mobility can drive productivity up by 33% on average. This is a transformative effect on any business”

The Cisco partnership provides a critical piece of the mobility puzzle — a growing area of interest for many organisations that are looking to unleash higher levels of productivity. Surveys show enabling mobility can drive productivity up by 33% on average. This is a transformative effect on any business. IT leaders understandably want to enable mobility without compromising on security, and Logicalis harnesses the secure encryption and identity protocols of Cisco with Citrix mobility solutions, removing the risk while enabling the business.

Internationally, Logicalis has implemented many Cisco-related projects, including one of the largest contracts in Europe. Our technical teams have been nominated for, and won, several distinguished awards. At a group level, Logicalis is Cisco’s second largest partner in Europe and one of Cisco’s top ten partners worldwide. We are one of the leading telco-independent network and communications providers and Cisco’s leading partner in this category.

Whenever there is a discussion about technology, such as moving to the cloud or enabling secure mobility, it is always useful to flip the question and look at it from the customer’s perspective. What they are actually trying to do is improve the business in some way. When Logicalis recently surveyed 177 CIOs, they told us they want technology to help them achieve better outcomes and improved performance.

In the Irish market, we have seen wider cloud adoption make a substantial impact on our infrastructure software business, particularly during 2014. For example, we delivered a turnkey private cloud to allow the Mater Hospital maximise the resilience and scalability of its new cross-campus data centre. The hospital will drive significant efficiencies in terms of density, manageability, scalability, and resilience through the solution we designed. The Mater is now fully virtualised and the significantly reduced deployment times gives the hospital genuine flexibility to add to its service catalogue as and when required.

Many organisations are understandably concerned about managing the transition from physical hardware to the virtual world of the cloud. In the Mater’s case, this was an extra challenge because the hospital’s critical systems had to stay online during the changeover. One of the key parts of the design brief was our ability to provide a seamless migration path with no disruption or downtime, and we successfully achieved this.

As one of the few systems integrators with multiple vendor accreditations including Cisco, Logicalis is architecturally and operationally independent. What this means for our customers is that we can identify and implement the right combination of hardware, software and services for each project on its merits – giving businesses the edge that leads to excellence.

 

Sinead Kelly is Cisco Alliance Manager with Logicalis

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