Last week was definitely The (Unofficial) Week in Cloud in Finland. I’m saying this because of first the Finnish Ministry of Transport and Communications published Finnish Cloud Services Landscape and then Finnish IT-journal “Tietokone” published an article of how to migrate your business IT to the cloud.
The Finnish Ministry of Transport and Communications published a great publication of cloud services in April 2013. The publication is titled as “Finnish Cloud Services Landscape“.
The publication has a great review of what cloud services are, what are the pros and cons of them and how the market will grow in the future (+40% 2012 – 2014). I encourage everyone to read the paper. Unfortunately it’s been written in Finnish.
Another publication published in April 2013 was “How to migrate your business IT to the cloud” written by Ari Saarelainen in Finnish IT-journal Tietokone.
Our company Onrego Ltd and our cloud service Online System Center, was well featured in the article among with Nervogrid, another hot Finnish cloud company. Oh, and there were also couple of minor cloud service companies such as Microsoft, Google, HP and IBM. 🙂
We are proud to announce the fact that Onrego Online System Center workstation management, based on Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager 2012, is now multitenant and available for MSP’s around the world either as whitelabel or branded as Online System Center.
We launched Onrego Online System Center for corporations on November 1st 2012, and today we launch Onrego Online System Center for managed service providers (MSP) as well. MSP’s can now use our innovation in managing their end customers’ workstations and users and benefit from the power of Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager, which is, by Gartner Magic Quadrant for Client Management Tool, the leader in the field as you can see in the following figure (Copyright Gartner, found from Microsoftnow.com).
MSP’s can manage the tenants from Onrego Online System Center Portal with fully automated processes. Management Console can be given to the appropriate tenant if needed with no worries in security matters.
You don’t have to worry about network or domain boundaries. Onrego Online System Center workstation management can manage workstations where ever they are located and no matter who owns them. MSP’s can also benefit from mass management, such as delpoying patches to every tenant at once.
We are able to give a demo account for a MSP on a request. Meanwhile, we have couple of teasers of tenant management as well as basic workstation management.
Example of tenant management in Onrego Online System Center:
Example of basic workstation management in Onrego Online System Center:
We believe the future is cloud based! We believe our customers, partners and MSP’s should pay only for what they are using with no upfront investments. Contact us and build your business as scalable and flexible one!
In connection with the application process for Microsoft Gold Partnership, we conducted a customer satisfaction survey based on Microsoft CSAT questionnaire. The results are now out and we are proud to share them with you all.
Our customers feel that Onrego is a good partner for them (in fact better than the average of Microsoft Partner), 100% of our customers are satisfied with us and is 100% willing to recommend us and buy from us again. We thank our customers for their trust!
As always, there was room for improvement as well and we will focus in particular on improving the quality of our communication towards our customers. This feedback will help us to develop our activities and we aim to achieve 100% satisfaction also in this area when we conduct the survey again!
We want to use this moment to thank all of our customers and wish them a great, sunny beginning of spring in this vernal equinox!
Jeff Woolsey, Principal Program Manager from Microsoft, kept his keynote speech at Microsoft TechDays Helsinki 2013 this morning and mentioned Onrego and Onrego Online System Center!
Jeff talked to Finnish IT professionals for an hour and a half of Cloud OS and virtualization. Great technologies such as Windows Server 2012 and System Center were mentioned many times in his speech, but one thing really hit the spot. In the end of Jeff’s show he pointed out that there is one domestic Microsoft partner that has all these great things ready to go as a cloud service and that one partner is Onrego Ltd.
Thank you Jeff for mentioning Onrego and Onrego Online System Center!
For more information of Onrego and Onrego Online System Center, Management as a Service solution based on Microsoft System Center, please don’t hesitate to contact us.
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.
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.
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!
In the following article I’m exposing how our startup is trying to stay focused on the essential matters and what does our customers mean to us.
A couple of days ago I read about another hot Finnish startup called Jolla and the way they are leading their crew. Jolla is continuing Nokia’s work on MeeGo based smartphones and is recruiting new employees at an accelerated pace. Jolla’s CEO Jussi Hurmola told in the article that the employees of Jolla form new teams very month with coordination from the management team based on tasks need to be done. They are calling them as iteration rounds like in agile development.
What a wonderful idea I thought and started thinking of how those methods would work for our startup Onrego Ltd. Suddenly I realized that we are already working almost like that even though our iteration round is one week rather than Jolla’s one month. We have a management team meeting weekly which lasts for two hours. In the meeting we summarize what we have done within the week and what should we do next. We are mostly concentrating on developing our cloud services and discussing about the meetings with clients, with which we have had great discussions about their expectations of IT services now and in the near future. We are very thankful to our clients for all the meetings so far!
Many of our friends have been asking how it feels to be a startup entrepreneur. I may have replied as “excellent” but what I meant was, was “quite dizzy” :). That’s because there one million and more tasks to fulfill because basically you have no processes, no infrastructure, nor any assistants. You have to build everything from the ground up. That’s why Onrego has milestones and targets which should lead our way and help us stay focused on the essential matters. The milestones also help us achieve something, and let us feel success, which is essential for every company and its employees.
Because our hands are full of tasks, we are trying to get rid of garbage. For example we are using internal discussion forum to minimize email traffic, which normally creates lots of interruptions. We are also teleworking whenever it’s useful and have quick chats with some of our clients and our partners using Microsoft Lync, as I wrote couple of weeks ago. I have also been fan of Lean techniques for quite some time now and I try to implement them to Onrego’s daily work. If you don’t know what Lean is I suggest you take a look. While Lean was first developed for manufacturing goods, Lean has also been used for service production and for knowledge work as well.
Currently we are in the start-up phase developing our cloud services but as soon as we enter the production phase, we need to adjust our way to work a little bit. We are going to implement Balanced Scorecard as a framework which lets us to monitor our performance. One very important measure to Onrego is customer satisfaction. Customer satisfaction is so important that Kenneth, our Chief Customer Officer, will have his eyes and ears on the heartbeat of our clients and informs the management team of how we have succeeded.
I might open up our working methods a little bit more in the future when we hit the production phase with our cloud services.
On this week’s Friday Finland is having a national day of teleworking. Employees are encouraged to work from home to save the nature but also to increase their productivity. Onrego is going to attend the act but an agenda of it’s own.
Our friends at Sulava have been talking about knowledge work and one essential part of it is productivity and ability to telework. There are couple of technical problems about how to allow employees to do modern knowledge work, but luckily we at Onrego have solutions for that :).
Beside cultural challenges some organizations are facing with teleworking, managing devices such as laptops, tablets and mobile phones can be quite tricky or sometimes even impossible when employees are working from remote locations. We think that those devices MUST be managed wherever they may are located and teleworking shouldn’t be disallowed because of management issues.
Another modern issue with knowledge work and teleworking is consumerization and BYOD (Bring Your Own Device). Modern knowledge workers wants to use their own laptops, desktops, tablets and mobile phones. This is also a tricky thing for IT departments but the question should be: is productivity going to be increased and if so, how much? We believe productivity will be increased and so we think that employees SHOULD have a possibility to use their own devices at work, but with security in mind.
We are working on these issues and we believe that our upcoming solutions can be a great deal for IT departments but also for modern knowledge workers. Our solutions are going to include ability to manage devices where ever they are located but we will also include possibility to allow BYOD devices to be managed securely as well. Also, we are going to have a solution which will allow companies to allow the use of LOB apps to the BYOD devices. With security in mind of course. All of these will be delivered as cloud services, without the need of installation projects and with no deployment costs. We are bringing the future to the present day.
Meanwhile, let’s enjoy the national day of teleworking on Friday!
Microsoft made a statement at TechEd 2012 conference in Orlando. It’s now the Era of the Cloud Operating System. What this means? Let’s check out!
Today, Microsoft’s TechEd 2012 conference in Orlando was in its halfway. The opening keynote held by Microsoft’s Server and Tools Business Group president Satya Nadella a couple of days ago started a little storm within (social) media. Every tweet, blog and news article shouted out loud that it’s the Era of the Cloud O(perating) S(ystem)!
Oh, and there were also couple of minor cloud service companies such as Microsoft, Google, HP and IBM. 🙂
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