https://datacenter.cioreview.com/vendor/2017/ae_backoffice

Santhosh Varughese, CTO
“Today’s data centers live entirely in the cloud,” says Santhosh Varughese, CTO, AE Backoffice. When it comes to cloud-based data centers, they span across different infrastructure types: from a combination of on-premise to hybrid, and private to public clouds. “At AE Backoffice, we bring to the table, our unique understanding of how all these different technologies can be integrated together for seamless data center operations. AE Backoffice specializes in the design and deployment of technology solutions that leverage virtualization to provide “data center as a service” and “IT as a service” resulting in a lower total cost of ownership (TCO) and higher performance for its customers.

“For us, our number one goal revolves around ensuring high-availability while eliminating single point of failure,” Varughese explains. “We design our solutions in such a way that client’s applications stay ‘up’ regardless of whether they are located on physical servers across single or multiple sites.” To that end, the AE Backoffice team designs data center solution with the perspective of solving business problem for its customers. Their first step is defining and documenting client’s issues and problems and focusing on challenges such as escalating TCO costs, inconsistent performance, repetitive maintenance and hardware purchases, and disaster vulnerability.

With AE Backoffice, clients can customize products to fit their needs by subscribing to services that range from compute, storage, bandwidth, security, disaster recovery, and upgraded technical skills. This approach eliminates the menace of over-purchasing hardware and eventually “growing” into it.

The turmoil caused by Hurricane Sandy to the New Jersey/New York areas is an example of the vulnerability of a data center infrastructure. In the aftermaths of Sandy, AE Backoffice was approached by a New York-based property management company— whose in-office data centers hosted in Manhattan were damaged causing service breakdown for days—to design a stronger disaster recovery solution.

Features and benefits don’t mean anything unless we deliver predictable and quantifiable business results

“A mid-sized business with 300 employees that experiences technical interruption may be losing productivity of about $60,000-70,000 an hour,” illustrates Varughese. AE Backoffice reviewed their applications, technology landscape, and TCO in detail and compared it to the proposed solution for Year 1, 2, and 3, including everything from cooling bills to maintenance. Building a business case first established a return on investment for their client before any work was undertaken. Their solution leveraged the “data center as a service” model for the client and added private 10GB circuits from their office to the AE Backoffice data centers, creating multiple paths to avoid a single point of failure vulnerability. Four years down the lane till date, the client has experienced zero downtime and TCO savings year-over-year of approximately 30 percent.

One of the most exciting things about AE Backoffice’s roadmap is their R&D in enabling the shift from analog-based buildings to IoT that includes interaction and monitoring in real time. Smart buildings will connect everything through the Internet, including building automation systems, lighting controls, environmental monitoring, and BMS. All systems will be integrated and rolled up into a consolidated dashboard allowing property managers to monitor as many buildings as required from a single workstation.

“IoT reminds us of the fact that eversince our civilization invented the wheels, improving the quality of life has been our primary objective,” comments Varughese. “By establishing safe and secure environment, IoT is playing key role in delivering rich user experience while enhancing process efficiency. Further, IoT provides a great opportunity for us to better focus on areas where technology can benefit human lives.”