ZIM

For ZIM, all roads lead to the cloud. Over $100,000 saved in capital costs.

The solution from HostedBizz removed the need to spend on new capital purchases. Additionally, with active server numbers increasing, ZIM were seeing a big rise in the temperature of their server room as well as increased hydro costs.

ZIM is a 25-year veteran of the software industry. ZIM develops and sells an Integrated Development Environment used by the software industry to develop complex database applications and management tools.

The company’s clientele ranges from SMB’s to large and enterprise customers as well as ISV’s. At ZIM, product development and IT infrastructure are intrinsically linked.

“Development and testing is what we live and breathe,” says ZIM Manager of R&D, Celso Bressan. “Our server environment changes almost daily as we power down, power up and scale compute resources to meet rigorous release criteria and timelines. Optimizing this aspect of our business operations was part of what drove us to evaluate Cloud. The second part is strategic. Once the business is running on the Cloud, ZIM will leverage Cloud to make software tools available to customers as a PaaS. This is the end game.”

Before moving to Cloud, ZIM owned, hosted and managed a 20+ VMware based server environment for software development and engineering. The servers resided in an on-site IT room alongside routing / switching equipment, NAS storage and a UPS system. Management and maintenance was also an on-site, fulltime function. While motivated by business improvements and transformation, impending capital expenditures accelerated ZIM’s project timeline. Server hardware was nearing end of life (EOL) and the UPS system needed replacing.

Today, ZIM operates 18 virtual Windows and Linux machines for development and testing. These machines run on specialized hardware – a couple of grades above the company’s retired assets. Resiliency is infinitely better with Cloud. While ZIM’s on-premise solution delivered high availability, Cloud extends them the added benefits of redundancy, failover and business continuity.

ZIM estimates annual savings to be upwards of 50% as a result of moving to Cloud. ZIM is now primed to realize Cloud’s greatest potential: the Cloud enablement of its software tools to customers as a PaaS.

Without dev and testing servers running at full tilt day and night, the temperature at ZIM is no longer a “hot” topic. Power and cooling is now wrapped into the company’s metered Cloud service and the $100,000 UPS and Server capex replacement was avoided entirely.

Since ZIM’s transition to Cloud, IT management and maintenance has gone from cost center to profit center. With Cloud, drudgery server work is alleviated and server provisioning and capacity scaling – something ZIM is continuously doing, is reduced from hours to mere minutes. IT staff is freed up to focus on revenue generating activities. In total, ZIM estimates annual savings to be upwards of 50% as a result of moving to Cloud.