Building geographically distributed cloud business with ISPsystem platform ecosystem

About the client

Illevante Cloud is geographically distributed cloud provider incorporated in Great Britain. Apart from the United Kingdom, the company and its subsidiaries operate in the Middle East (UAE, Oman, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Qatar) and its presence is steadily growing.

Project background

Increased global popularity of cloud technologies acts as a catalyst for development of providers. In order to keep meeting the demand, the companies have to add their capacity without sacrificing quality.

The provider challenged itself to launch separate subdivisions in several regions of the Middle East, using a unified software product for service provisioning and resource management.

The company has built its infrastructure on the basis of leased dedicated servers through the use of the following products:

WHMCS as a billing platform;
SolusVM for virtualization and quick VPS provisioning to clients;
Cpanel and Plesk Web-hosting for client's IP address management and hosting management;
Local resources for backing-up.

When working with the current stack, Illevante Cloud faced a number of problems, such as:

Automation restrictions. Large number of processes managed manually by the team. It reduced business operational efficiency, increased the risk of human error, and made it troublesome to organize work in other regions.
Low scalability of resources against the background of growing business demands caused low efficiency in peak hours.
High costs of physical hardware technical maintenance.
Restrictions of backing-up and disaster recovery resulting from obsolescence of tools.
Difficulties in organizing sales management against the background of geographically distributed business.
Difficulties in ensuring data security against the background of changing legislations in all countries of operation.

All these factors impeded the company's scaling up to a high standard, as well as posed risk to ensuring business integrity. This forced the client to think about transitioning to more advanced software products that would allow achieving their objective and coping with the related tasks.

Project tasks and objectives

Illevante Cloud needed to optimize their business, increase revenue, reduce time for service provisioning, and consolidate service provisioning through application of an integrated solution that:

meets current business tasks;
allows the company to adapt resources to changing demands;
ensures client data protection;
allows product customization;
ensures seamless integration with third-party products and systems.

In addition, it was important for the client that the developer had technical support and usable software interface.

Project solutions

Upon analyzing products represented in local and global markets, the client settled on ISPsystem product ecosystem.

Illevante Cloud use BILLmanager platform for automation of the company's service sales, client communication. The following tools are instrumental for this purpose:

single interface for managing services, sales and client database;
Integrated client’s and administrator's personal accounts with multiple functions;
flexible tariffs, pricing and payment;
automated resource provisioning and management, traffic monitoring;
automated payment acceptance that allows connecting several payment systems;
a set of marketing tools for promotion of company’s services;
integrated analytical tools.

BILLmanager Hosting&Cloud is the platform for automation of cloud and hosting service sales – from online service ordering to communication with technical support.

BILLmanager can manage allocated resources, keep account of them and set tariffs when integrated with VMmanager, which is the platform for automation of creating and provisioning clients with virtual infrastructure objects (VPS, VDS) as well as SaaS services. The platform ensures:

centralized resource management in all regions of operation from a single window;
preparation and provisioning of VPS/VDS to clients;
automated installation of operating systems;
IP addresses management.

In the scope of the project, the client’s team also uses two ISPsystem ecosystem products in test mode:

IPmanager panel

for client IP address usage monitoring. The product operates in conjunction with BILLmanager and VMmanager to provide the client with data storage.

DNSmanager panel

for centralized management of client domain names and DNS zones. Integration with VMmanager platform allows the panel to convert IP addresses to domain names.

When used as a complex, these products facilitate automation of provisioning and selling cloud services without additional need to engage managers and technical personnel to provisioning and configuring resources.

Project implementation

It took two and a half months to implement new software – from testing to production use. ISPsystem technical team supported the client at all project stages. The team was addressing the emerging issues and conducted seamless data migration.

Distinctive features of project solutions

Ecosystem-based approach

Software product ecosystems allow clients to find integrated solutions to business tasks.

This is how ISPsystem platform ecosystem helps cloud and hosting providers start up turnkey business, while ensuring compatibility of all product components. The use of single-vendor products improves efficiency of current business processes and reduces implementation cost for the new ones. Moreover, the products can be used independently from one another..

Multifunction products out-of-the-box

ISPsystem platform feature multiple tools and integrations to replace several software products at once and to solve business tasks in an integrated fashion.

This is exactly how the client uses BILLmanager billing platform under the all-in-one principle. For example, not only the product has allowed cloud service provisioning automation, but also addressed a number of additional demands:

1. Managing geographically distributed sales in a single window.

Company’s subdivisions are located in various countries under varied legal entities and names. Built-in multi-provider option allows the client to connect all subdivisions to a single billing system and manage sales in an integrated fashion.

2. Setting up professional user support.

Built-in ticket system is instrumental for this purpose. Support for various communication channels including email, sms and push notifications allows to always keep in touch with the client.

3. Domain management.

BILLmanager allows the client to register, manage and migrate domain names between registars.

VMmanager platform’s main purpose is to endure quick preparation and provisioning of virtual servers to client, but its functions also allowed the client to solve another critical task. The platform in Illevante Cloud project allows for virtual machine backup and disaster recovery of data in the event of incidents.

Administrator can create virtual machine snapshots prior to execution of risky operations on them. In case of unexpected events, administrator can always return to initial system configuration.

Functionality of platforms can be extended through additional modules and plugins or customization. Products have open API, which allows for their integration with any third-party products and systems.

Unlimited scale-up functionality

ISPsystem products allow to scale up computing resources without compromising their performance. For example, VMmanager platforms supports creation of 100,000+ virtual machines in a cluster.

Intuitive interface

ISPsystem platform interface has been designed with regard to usability trends, and therefore, it is simple even for new users. Besides, administrators can find any information related to system operation in the documentation.

BILLmanager platform has user-friendly design both in administrator and client personal accounts. User can independently order and pay for the service, track order status, manage services: change previously placed orders, change validity period, deactivate services, view order history and etc.

Takeaways and plans

The client has successfully migrated to ISPsystem ecosystem products: VMmanager, BILLmanager, DNSmanager, and IPmanager. New products facilitated automation of current business processes, reduced the load of physical hardware, and provided the company with a reliable backup and recovery system.

The software is now facilitating sales of cloud solutions within geographically distributed client network and scale up business processes without interruption of critical workflow.

Opinion

“ISPsystem platforms – BILLmanager, VMmanager, DNSmanager and IPmanager – set new standards of hosting industry. These integrated products optimized our business processes, increased operational efficiency and ensured comfortable management of corporate resources. Besides, ISPsystem products allowed our business to achieve high standards of performance and reliability”

Alwahed Muhammad
CEO & Founder