Today we have launched a new press release about the cooperation of Onrego and Lemonquat. Let me explain what this means.
As I wrote in my post The Future is Cloud Based, we had over 150 meetings with clients and partners during Fall 2012. We found out that there are lots of companies that are interested in cloud services but which does not yet have a decent cloud strategy or roadmap. With this in mind, we decided to start cooperating with Lemonquat Ltd, a Finnish company focusing on management consulting and service integrations.
Onrego and Onrego’s clients benefit from Lemonquat in many ways. Lemonquat is a trusted advisor in aligning ICT with business needs and can help our clients to reshape their ICT strategy. Lemonquat can also design cloud strategies and roadmaps for our clients and their expertise in outsourcing is very useful because cloud services can be seen as the next generation of outsourcing. Or should we say “as cloudsourcing”.
I do warmly welcome Lq Boys to be part of Onrego Ecosystem!
Microsoft TechDays Helsinki starts tomorrow in Finlandia Hall, Helsinki. You can meet Onrego Boys there!
Microsoft’s biggest event for IT professionals and developers, TechDays Helsinki 2013, is about to begin. This year the event will be held in Finlandia Hall and approx. 1700 people are expected to enter. Although Onrego is not a partner of the event (we tried but partner packages were already sold out :(), you can meet Onrego Boys there.
Our whole crew will be there and I’m also able to spend almost whole Tuesday meeting with friends and customers. Our CTO Pekka Onnela will be presenting “Datacenters without boundaries – System Center to managing your cloud” on Wednesday 2:30 – 3:30 PM and he is also attending the big cloud panel on Wednesday 3:45 – 4:45 PM with Jeff Woolsey, Principal Program Manager from Microsoft Corporation.
I have couple of key takeaways for you. #1 Check out Samsung’s booth. I heard they have a unique management solution you should check. #2 Check out Jeff’s keynote on Tuesday. I heard he has some great news to share!
Great news! Onrego Ltd together with Centero Ltd has closed a major deal with Tiera Ltd, a Finnish service provider for Finnish municipalities, to deliver Onrego’s Online System Center to Finnish municipalities.
Tiera starts to deliver Onrego‘s Online System Center cloud service to Finnish Municipalities. Onrego Online System Center is an innovative systems Management as a Service solution based on Microsoft System Center technologies. The deal covers workstation and mobile device management as a service as well as software packaging provided by Centero.
The deal is an exclusive three-year contract with an extra three-year option worth of few million euros.
Onrego and Microsoft put together a roadtrip in Finland. We wanted to let everyone know about Private Cloud and Microsoft System Center, the possibilities of them and how they would benefit organisations.
The tour was branded as “Datacenters without borders”. The sessions were based on Microsoft Private Cloud Immersion (PCI) concept, which is like a backstage of Customer Immersion Experience (CIE), a concept to experience new collaboration technologies such as Microsoft Lync and Microsoft Sharepoint.
Our tour started from Lahti, went through Oulu, Tampere, Kuopio and Turku, and finally ended to Vaasa yesterday. We were able to gather tens of people to listen and experience new possibilities of modern datacenter management. We talked about the key drivers of Private Cloud, how to benefit from Microsoft Azure IaaS, how to implement modern datacenter management and Private Cloud using Microsoft technologies and also about the latest possibilities with self service and orchestration.
While Onrego’s Pekka Onnela kept most of the sessions, I had a pleasure to visit Kuopio and have a great time there with an excellent audience. But I didn’t have a change to taste kalakukko due to a tight schedule though.
I’m already looking for the next tour with Microsoft and in the mean time, if someone is interested about modern datacenter management and benefits of Private Cloud using Microsoft technologies, please don’t hesitate to contact us!
Next a couple of nice pictures of Onrego’s Pekkadoing his thang.
Holiday season is about to begin and most of companies also end their fiscal year. Whilst Onrego’s first fiscal year doesn’t end until July 2013 I think it’s time to put together what we have accomplished so far.
Onrego Ltd has been alive and operational for five months. When most companies end their fiscal year in couple of weeks, Onrego still continues its first fiscal year until July 2013. Why is that? Well, there are three reasons. First, Onrego Ltd was established in July and begun operational in August, so it kind of automatically made our fiscal year to be from August to July. Second, we wanted to have the same fiscal year period as Microsoft has. That makes us to live in heartbeat synchronization. And third, I see no sense why December should be last month of fiscal year. June or July is more logical since you’d do your homerun towards summer vacation and you’d start with a clean desk after the vacation.
While our fiscal doesn’t in this month, let me do a brief summary of the start of Onrego’s journey. As I wrote in my previous post, we have had over 150 meetings with clients and partners. I’d say that is quite a lot for our size of company. I have personally been involved in most of them and that for example has given me very valuable feedback from our customers and also given me lots of customer understanding to be used as a fuel for upcoming Onrego cloud services.
Although we have only been operating for five months by now, we have still being able to generate a 6 figure turnover in euro at the end of December 2012. When we started we planned a budget. Planning a budget for company that has not yet started can be rather difficult because we had no historical data to compare and back then we didn’t have any products or services to sale. But we made a budget and I can tell you that our sales is actually following the budget very closely. That is a very good accomplishment for our team!
I also wrote in my “The Onrego Working Methods” post in September 2012 that we have milestones that 1) guide us but also 2) rewards us. We have 34 milestones set for our fiscal year 2013 (starting from July 2012 and ends July 2013 = 13 months) and so far we have achieved 12 of them! I’d say that is also a great work!
Here is nice dashboard of what we have accomplished so far:
We are having great discussion with great customers and I’m looking forward to start working with them in 2013! But now it’s time for the Onrego Boys to take a short break and spend some time with their
families and so we wish Merry Christmas and happy holidays for all of you!
A month ago Onrego launched its first cloud service, Online System Center. Back then I posted about the launch of Online System Center and as a post-speech I wrote that Online System Center is not going to be the only cloud service Onrego is going to develop and produce. Let’s dive a little deeper into that subject.
We have had over 150 meetings with clients and partners since August 2012 and with the information gathered from the clients, we have drawn a clear picture of what kind of cloud services should be available next. But before diving deeper into the upcoming Onrego cloud services, let’s put together a few (mega)trends we have been seen so far. First, Microsoft System Center is the systems management solution corporations are going to implement. There is no question about that. Direct quote from one meeting: “we are not going to look any other management solution than Microsoft System Center”. Second, large corporations want to have scalability and flexibly especially to pricing models. They want to buy services as “pay-as-you-go” model with monthly fees. Third, within the next two years we are seeing that the most of the workload in companies’ datacenters have moved to hosters and IaaS service providers, but only to hosters with scalable pricing model. Fourth, many companies want to implement System Center Service Manager as the service desk tool and forget their service providers’ tools. Needless to say that Onrego Online System Center hits the spot for the most of these (mega)trends.
But now, let’s roll a little deeper into Onrego‘s future. Onrego‘s vision is to develop and produce cloud services that (1) allows our clients to get rid of their own datacenters and local area networks, (2) allows our clients to translate their current IT infrastructure into scalable and flexible one, and (3) allows our clients to have the very best IT infrastructure solutions with instantly ready use, with no upfront investments and with monthly billing. In other words, we produce IT Infrastructure as a Service. This includes services such as VDI as a Service, Active Directory as a Service, Datacenter Management as a Service, Top Level Experts as a Service, Cloud Orchestration as a Service, and so on. We started with Management as a Service (Online System Center) since being able to manage and monitor devices and servers is one of the core features of healthy IT infrastructure. Please see the following diagram of what Onrego‘s future is about to be.
We have also been building an ecosystem for Online System Center and later for Onrego online services and at the moment; our ecosystem consists of half of dozen well selected partners who are working with us and with our clients to make future be available today.
For partners and resellers who wish to be part of this journey I welcome you to contact us and arrange a meeting with us.
For organizations who are interested about these kinds of services I encourage you to ask us for a visit so that we can discuss together how our services would benefit your business.
I predict that the year 2013 will be very interesting! We will be seeing lots of companies starting to move their IT infrastructure services into cloud and lots of new service implementations that are cloud based. Whilst cloud based IT infrastructure will not be future anymore in year 2013, I predict we are also seeing hybrid solutions as well.
In one project we have been doing for one of our client, the world class scripting aid was needed. Who did we choose for the job? Me :).
Well let’s be honest. I wasn’t that keen on starting scripting because it feels like ages ago when I last wrote a few lines of code. But what can you do when especially MY skills were needed (according to my colleague – a great salesman)?
The job was to clone users from one Active Directory forest to another while updating group memberships. Migration was not an answer for the matters I’m not going to discuss in this space. Somehow I chose PowerShell and CSVDE and LDIFDE for the job. CSVDE was user to create new users and LDIFDE to update group memberships. And PowerShell was used to orchestrate the whole thing. Sounded like a plan. But not exactly.
The thing I like about scripting is that it’s actually problem solving. Not writing a code. And that is one thing I think I’m good at. Solving problems.
Another great thing about scripting is that you always learn something new. When you discover that you knew that you knew everything but it turned out that you know nothing, it keeps your boots safely on the ground.
One lesson I learned this time was that if you have Scandinavian characters in your group names, LDIFDE wants to convert the strings to base64. That complicates things a bit when you want to do string manipulation with members. One free advice: you can find convert-data cmdlet from /n software‘s NetCmdLets package :).
Today is the day! We have been working our asses off for the last three months and now our first cloud service is seeing the day light. Today we have launched Onrego’s Online System Center. System Center as a Service, Systems Management as a Service and Management as a Service. Let’s take a closer look!
We are very proud to present our first cloud service Online System Center. Online System Center is cloud based systems management service for managing workstations, servers and mobile devices, monitoring server, services and network devices as well as for running service desk. Online System Center is based on Microsoft System Center 2012 and run from Onrego’s cloud. The benefits for clients and partners are enormous! Microsoft System Center 2012 solutions are instantly ready to use without any upfront investments and invoicing is based on actual usage. Plus the solutions are configured already based on the best practices. Online System Center is the killer cloud service at the moment.
We have two websites for Online System Center: one in Finnish and another one in English. The address for the Finnish version is www.onlinesystemcenter.fi and English version can be found from www.onlinesystemcenter.com.
Since you can find more details about Online System Center from the websites, I’m not going to go any further with the details in this space. Rather than that, I want to share to you a few things our team at Onrego has done.
Three months ago we started only with a killer idea of building our own cloud service of Microsoft System Center. Since August 2012 we have had 150 meetings with clients and partners, we have built the first version of Online System Center, the first customers are already using the service and we have run a marketing campaign including teaser videos, websites, social media activities, press releases and upcoming advertisements. It’s been quite hectic time but we have loved every minute of it.
Our website www.onrego.com (www.onrego.fi in Finnish) had a timer of Online System Center launch. The launch took place on November 1st 2012 11 AM.
We produced three teasers which we uploaded to Youtube to give an idea of what we are doing and what benefits could Online System Center have.
Here are the teasers:
Teaser #1 “Amazing Things Happen On November 1st 2012”
Teaser #2 “Things Are About To Change On November 1st 2012”
Teaser #3 “The World We Are Living In On November 1st 2012”
We also produced two more videos of Online System Center and its features prior to the launch and upcoming sales and marketing activities.
Online System Center presentation in English:
Online System Center presentation in Finnish:
While our journey has just begun, I want to thank our team at Onrego: Antti, Kenneth, Kimmo and Pekka, you have made fantastic job; our friends at Microsoft, our friends in Online System Center Ecosystem and, of course, our wonderful clients!
Now, Online System Center is not going to be the only cloud service Onrego is going to produce. We have many more killer cloud services coming up that we have developed with our clients. Stay tuned!
It was only a three months ago when I went to National Board of Patents and Registration of Finland to established our company Onrego Ltd. So far we have had over 100 meetings with clients and partners and have had great discussions with them.
Couple of days ago Finnish IT journal Tietoviikko (tivi.fi) referred to an article from Computerworld concerning how rewarding it is to work with startup companies for IT executives in corporates. In the article Computerworld’s Johanna Ambrosio writes as:
IT leaders said the biggest benefit of working with startups is access to leading-edge technology that solves their business problems more quickly than they could by building something internally.
Even I wouldn’t have said that any better! I have had over 60 meetings with clients and partners expressing myself and together Onrego have had way over 100 meetings since August 2012. We have been presenting our ideas of modern IT infrastructure to our clients and have had great discussions and feedback. In fact, our first cloud service is going to go public within the next few weeks and on next Monday; we are having the first Proof of Concept with our client. We have also been gathering great partners to our ecosystem, which we are going launch a little bit later.
It has been fun to acknowledge that many other friends and partners are also expressing themselves and turned into entrepreneurs. The last one is upcoming consulting company focusing on cloud technologies called Cloud 1 Oy by MVP Harri Puupponen. Besides meetings I have been expressing myself with other duties that the CEO of young startup can have, such as developing a portal for our cloud services and buying espresso from Stockmann for the employees.
While buying espresso does not require any special skills, I have had a change to do some serious multitasking with my partners at Onrego and to seek my limits especially with my developing skills. I need to remind that I have been World Champion of Scripting two times a row, but still doing stuff with Visual Studio 2012, ASP.NET MVC4 and Microsoft System Center Orchestrator 2012 is something I didn’t know I was capable of. But with enormous self-confidence I was managed to develop a great portal for our clients. I can say I have been expressing myself big time lately :).
A good friend of mine is a lecturer in a senior high school. He asked me if I want to do a presentation for his class about entrepreneurship. At first I was like, “yeah, why not”, but more I have been thinking about it, more thrilled about it I have got. I just can’t wait to be able to get up and speak about entrepreneurship and the ability to express yourself. As we are expressing ourselves at Onrego, as our partners are expressing themselves, and as our clients will be expressing themselves with a little help from us.
JarnoMaki.com 