Acuutech’s new MESH platform has certainly created a lot of excitement in the market, promising a transformation in the way business IT is deployed, managed, and maintained in small- to mid-market organisations. We asked Philip Moss, Acuutech Chief Product Officer, to share his insight into the vision behind the new platform and why it is so relevant to today’s business environment.
Let me start with some background. In most organisations, IT and the business itself are tightly coupled, especially when considering performance and outcomes. IT services enable the business and have clearly become ubiquitous over recent years. To underline this, a 2017 survey of CEOs identified the top 10 issues faced by SMEs and showed that IT and the delivery of key services were inexorably linked to most of them. So when IT works well, the business should, in theory, also be working well. But how do we define ‘well’? In answering this question, we need to first consider that the conventional IT procurement and operating model has become characterised by complexity, unreliability, high cost, and resistance to change. Industry trends, on the other hand, are all pointing towards systems characterised by simplicity, responsiveness, reliability, efficiency, and low cost-of-ownership. How do we square this circle?
Many organisations are struggling with the problems caused by the conventional model, a scenario some describe as being locked in an IT straitjacket, unable to pursue a business strategy because of IT limitations. Inside that straitjacket, business processes are rigid when they should be agile, services can be unreliable, obsolescence is a continuing threat, and, for many, costs are running out of control.
Change is almost impossible to implement in third-party applications, while security and regulatory compliance is in a constant state of flux. The promise of new technologies including hyper-converged infrastructure and cloud solutions cannot be realised despite their enormous potential, while managed services, another key trend, cannot be fully deployed.
This background has informed and influenced the vision for our new IT platform, MESH. The challenge has been to develop a system that overturns the problems and failings of the conventional model but also intercepts the latest in technology and services delivery to offer a future-proof platform. We are confident that MESH offers a significant shift in the way that IT is owned, operated, and maintained. More importantly, it meets the need for a turnkey, modular IT system designed primarily for real-world conditions and real-world organisations.
We wanted to offer organisations an IT platform which broke the existing rules, so operational concepts, such as pay-as-you-go, are included, allowing IT services to be rapidly scaled up or down, and customers are offered a choice of pre-integrated business services which are guaranteed to be constantly updated. Taking advantage of the latest technology means we can offer a powerful, reliable infrastructure and significantly reduce complexity and sprawl in the data centre, while the latest cloud solutions provide real flexibility in service hosting, delivery, and reach.
An important part of the MESH vision is to lower the cost-of-ownership. The platform is very simple in terms of administration and management thus reducing the need for highly skilled IT resources. It is, however, in the area of life cycle costs where the greatest benefits will be realised because MESH and its service portfolio are remotely and automatically maintained, meaning that obsolescence and change are no longer difficult issues. The platform enables pay-as-you-go computing so that customers only pay for the capacity and services they consume when they consume them, an efficient pricing model that offers potential major cost savings.
So how have we achieved all this? Exploiting Acuutech’s extensive services background and its enduring relationships with Microsoft®, Lenovo™, and other leading industry providers, our team quickly identified an architecture and operational concept which could deliver the necessary performance features and characteristics. This rapidly matured into MESH, and the platform is built on the latest technologies including hyperconverged infrastructure, pre-integrated business services, and cloud solutions in a modular, turnkey platform. Combining Acuutech’s world-renowned expertise with the proven capabilities of Microsoft and Lenovo™, MESH is built on a strong foundation. It is designed to be a high-performance, high-availability platform which sits at the heart of the business and is an asset rather than a liability. Transformation is a bold claim, yet that is exactly what MESH delivers. We are confident that customers will see massive improvements in the way they use and consume IT, in effect improving agility, responsiveness, time-to-market, admin and management, and operational efficiency.