Intelligent CIO Africa Issue 80 | Page 46

FEATURE : HYPER CONVERGENCE

Scaling managed services with hyperconvergence

A growing business with a range of services , Metacom was not only at the end of its current technology lifecycle , but also realised it was set to face capacity constraints if it did not upgrade to hyperconverged infrastructure .

Metacom , is a South Africa based , managed service provider that operates from Cape Town and has around 100 employees . Metacom also produces and deploys its own router hardware and assists in delivering various . These include SD-WAN , POS , multi-media , Wi-Fi solutions , which require secure and uninterrupted access to the network .

While Metacom has clients come from diverse industries , the managed service provider is also a specialised player in the retail sector . Metacom provides services to more than 7,000 retail outlets in 20 plus countries .
Metacom hosts a live , real-time environment that is made up of digital displays , audio and radio streaming , full spectrum Wi-Fi services , VoIP , retail analytics , and its network performance solution Metacom Online .
Pain points
As a managed service provider Metacom cannot experience any downtime or latency with its network since that would directly impact the performance of its hosted services for its customer base . Also none of these solutions can suffer downtime and need to be able to scale in hours if a client ’ s needs change .
As Metacom approached the five-year technology upgrade cycle milestone , it decided to look for a vendor partner that understood its requirement of scalability , would be ready to grow with its business , and would also be affordable for Metacom .
46 INTELLIGENTCIO AFRICA www . intelligentcio . com