Servecentric and Viatel are two thriving independent Irish companies that provide data center and managed services. Servecentric offers a range of managed services in addition to traditional data center services from its facility established in 2002. Viatel is the data center and enterprise telecom division of Digiweb Group, which acquired Viatel in 2013 and now has facilities across 21 European locations. Reliability and managing power consumption are increasingly important offerings as clients require more bandwidth and have greater power needs. Both companies work with clients to determine the appropriate data center services and solutions to suit their specific infrastructure and application hosting requirements.

1. March 2015 | The Sunday Business Post | 23
The indigenous leaders
compliance requirements.
“From PCI or regulatory
authority mandates to reas-
suring trading partners, the
physical and logical control
thatdatacentresbringtothat
whole sphere of regulation,
standards, security and ac-
creditation becomes a huge
benefit to the clients.”
n the data centre
world, terms like
‘independent’ are
often used, while in Ireland
weliketoknowwhichcom-
panies – in any sector – are
indigenous.
In this context we have
the thriving Servecentric
and Viatel. The former is a
single facility established in
2002thatisuniquebecauseit
combinesarangeofmanaged
services with the traditional
‘pure’ data centre services.
Viatel is the enterprise
telecomsanddatacentredi-
visionoftheDigiwebGroup,
whichisnowanIrishmulti-
national with facilities in 21
European locations since it
acquiredLondon-headquar-
tered Viatel in 2013.
“Thereasonthedatacentre
exists as a business today is
essentiallythesameasinthe
past, I think. It is a location
that allows an organisation
to house its ICT infrastruc-
ture with connectivity and
high SLAs,” said Paul Kane,
interim sales and marketing
manager at Servecentric.
“What we sell as a spe-
cialisedfacilityissomething
thatwouldbehardoruneco-
nomicforanorganisationto
provide itself. We sell reli-
ability. Our clients can take
advantage of that through
traditional co-location, any
of the cloud options, Infra-
structure-as-a-Service or
as a fully managed service,”
said Kane.
“An element that should
be mentioned, because it is
more and more of a limiting
factor, is the issue of power.
Tenyearsagowewouldhave
talked about the number of
racks and the space. Now
the power consumption has
moved to the top of the list.
Connectivity, on the other
hand, a major selling point
of data centres, is competi-
tiveandalmostacommodity
with prices way down and
bandwidth gone up and still
climbing. We have just up-
gradedourmeshbandwidth
to 10 gigabits because that is
the direction of our clients’
requirements,” he said.
“Our client relationships
go from simple co-location
where we sometimes have
minimal interaction with
the client to fully managed
serviceswherewereallytake
overentirefunctionsandrun
them. That end of the busi-
ness is a much deeper level
of involvement and we tend
to take a very consultative
approach, especially with a
new client.”
Servecentric’s portfolio
includes the three-year-old
Kloudcentriccloudplatform,
whichoffersscalablepay-as-
you-useresourcesthatrange
fromwebhostingtoavirtual
privatedatacentre.“Wealso
partnerwithanumberofICT
serviceproviders,whichhas
proven a good fit probably
because we have an almost
exclusivelytechnicalanden-
gineering staff,” said Kane.
“That gives them, as well as
our direct clients, the pedi-
gree of our range of accred-
itationsincludingPCIandall
relevant ISO standards.”
According to Viatel chief
information officer Seán
Convery, the market focus
for data centre services has
shifted. “The drive today is
as much about getting en-
terprise ICT infrastructure
off-premise as about the
specialised services that
only a top level data centre
canprovide.Availabilityand
uptimemeanszeroriskfrom
thecorporateviewpoint.The
key point of course is that
now we have the technol-
ogies to support that move,”
said Convery.
“In any event, tradition-
al in-house comms rooms
need technology refreshing,
whichmeansrecurringcapi-
talinvestment.Theyalsotend
to overlap in function with
what could be done more
effectively in a data centre
or in the cloud. In addition,
associated operational costs
like air conditioning are
constantly rising. Skills are
scarceandexpensiveaswell.
So off-premise resourcing
presents a serious business
case, with different models
ofserviceavailabletosuitan
organisation’s specific set of
needs,” he said.
“Straight co-location is
still a popular choice, but a
growing segment involves a
servicethatcoverstheinfra-
structure right through the
layerstotheoperatingsystem
level. It will stop short of the
applications, which tend to
bespecialistandcustomised.
“On the other hand, there
is a growing service around
the database and data stor-
age layers, which can be
independent of – or indeed
commonto–thevariousap-
plication vendors and their
support.”
Those ever more sophis-
ticated databases and the
associated new types of
distributed storage pose the
all too familiar challenge to
theenterprise,Converysaid:
“Dowestaffforthenecessary
skills or do we pay for a ser-
vice? In today’s market the
balanceisdefinitelytowards
a trusted service.”
Independent
Irishplayers
indatacentres
andservices
arethriving
Paul Kane
interim sales
and marketing
manager,
Servecentric
I