Zynstra reinvents how SMEs buy and manage IT

Zynstra has launched a solution designed to redress the balance between small and medium sized enterprises and larger companies when it comes to IT. For a monthly fee and with no up-front cost, it gives SMEs with up to 250 employees a fully managed IT solution that combines the reliability and security of on-premise IT with the economics and flexibility of the cloud. This hybrid approach to the cloud is already favoured by many large enterprises but to date has not been economically viable for smaller companies.

Rather than offering SMEs a ‘hand me down’ enterprise product scaled for smaller companies, Zynstra has reimagined a hybrid cloud solution for SMEs and built it from the ground up. Its patent-pending technology sits at the heart of the solution and is the key to making hybrid cloud affordable and giving SMEs hassle-free, enterprise-level IT with built-in reliability. The solution is delivered on HP hardware and managed by IT service providers. It comes with all the fundamental IT capabilities including storage, security, backup, recovery and optional applications such as MS Exchange and SharePoint, and the flexibility to handle other applications required by the business.

“Small and medium sized businesses often get a raw deal when it comes to IT,” said Nick East, CEO of Zynstra. “For them, IT is more often than not a drag on the business rather than a source of competitive advantage. Not to mention the fact that they typically pay more per person than a large enterprise for their IT and get an inferior product. We wanted to change all of that. We’ve built a product that is designed specifically for SMEs and doesn’t force them to choose between cloud and traditional IT. With Zynstra, they get the benefits of both, delivered by IT service providers. We believe this is the future of how small and medium sized businesses will manage IT.”

New economic model for SME IT
At the heart of Zynstra is a technology that standardises all deployments. By keeping every single customer implementation 100% standardised, Zynstra removes the high costs and reliability concerns associated with IT implementations that over time become increasingly customised and prone to failure. The innovative technology also enables Zynstra to keep every IT implementation current and consistent, ensuring that all software is up-to-date and the customer’s experience is as good years later as it is at the beginning.

Michael Clifford, cloud director of HP UK & Ireland, Zynstra’s hardware supplier, commented: “Zynstra is changing how SMEs can buy IT, giving them choices that they didn’t have before. In conjunction with HP hardware, Zynstra’s technology enables the company to provide SMEs with the functionality, cloud capability and low per-user cost that, until now, only large enterprises could enjoy.”

Built-in reliability
Zynstra’s IT solution for SMEs is delivered by IT service providers and installed on HP ProLiant servers that are delivered to the customer’s premises. The service providers manage the customer implementation remotely via the cloud using Zynstra’s management solution. Zynstra keeps all IT systems current by rolling out software updates via the cloud only once they’ve been fully tested in its lab and guaranteed conflict-free.

As a result, SMEs get all the benefits and functionality of a robust IT solution without any of the headaches, reliability issues and high costs. It also means that IT becomes easily scalable and SMEs can add or remove users as required. As with the initial installation, there is no upfront or set-up cost and SMEs pay only a per-user per-month fee for all required hardware and software.

Cycell has been using Zynstra prior to its official launch. “With Zynstra we have found that IT doesn’t have to be complicated and expensive. For a monthly fee we get all the functionality that we need and our IT service provider manages it all for us,” said Bill Darley, CFO for Cycell. “The all-OPEX model gives us predictable IT costs so I know what to budget for as we grow. It’s kept-up-to-date and is scalable so we are sure there will be no unexpected upgrade requirements.”

Zynstra’s solution delivers key infrastructure and applications including:
· Sophisticated security with firewalls, anti-malware, anti-phishing, anti-spam and intrusion detection
· File storage
· Domain control and authentication with MS Active Directory
· Backup and recovery
· Internet gateway with content filtering
· Applications including MS Exchange, MS SharePoint, Sage 50 and integrations with remote cloud based services such as MS Office365