Greetings from Also Cloud Expo 2014

March 27, 2014Leave a comment

This week we had an opportunity to attend Also Cloud Expo 2014 in Wanha Satama, Helsinki, Finland. Onrego had a booth and I had a speech about how customers are making a movement from producing their own IT infrastructure to service management and cloudsourcing. Let’s summarize the event with couple of pics.

The first ever Also Cloud Expo had an amazing spirit. It was about collaboration between doers and partners, driving the industry to the same direction and not seeing each other as a competitor. It was seeing each other as an opportunity to build the future and a competitive cloud service portfolio that creates value to customers.

Big news was published just couple of days before Also Cloud Expo: ALSO acquired Nervogrid. The acquisition made ALSO the leading Cloud Broker and the whole Expo was guided by the same message: now MSP’s and IT resellers can start to build a cloud service portfolio for their customers with no need to develop and do everything again if someone has already done it.

Mr. Perttu Monthan (@monthan) opened the event, followed by Mr. Jukka Kortesniemi from ALSO and Mr. Ari Rikkilä (@ari_rikkila) from Nervogrid (or ALSO Cloud, nowadays).

Mr. Samuli Savo (@samusavo) from Marketvisio kept an interesting keynote about insights of cloud services.

Couple of key takeaways from Samuli are:

It is wrong to compare just the price tag of on-premises installation and cloud service. To most organizations, agility matters and is the driver towards cloud.
Customers tend to buy cloud services from their trusted advisors.
MSP’s and IT resellers should focus on their added value on value chain: why would customers buy cloud services from you, if they can buy it from cloud service provider, such as Microsoft.
IaaS will grow a lot in the near future (and companies need cloud based server and service monitoring systems to monitor decentralized datacenters, such as Online System Center by Onrego)
Cloud Brokerage will also grow a lot in the future: the takeaway for MSP’s and IT resellers is: use and resell cloud services that already exists and create your own place in the value chain.

My speech was right after Samuli’s great keynote. I wanted to share our experience and customer stories about how customers are shifting from producing IT by themselves to service management.

I started by talking about outsourcing and how total outsourcing cases have been disappearing while customers are shifting to cloudsourcing model. One great opportunity for MSP’s and IT resellers is the fact in which customers that are now doing everything by themselves, are ready to move from insourcing straight to cloudsourcing. This creates a whole new market. The market is called Cloud Brokerage.

Jarno (@jarnomaki)

New Features to Online System Center for resellers and MSP’s

October 9, 2013October 9, 2013Leave a comment

I’m proud to announce new features to Onrego‘s Online System Center, a Microsoft System Center based systems management cloud service for end customers, resellers and MSP’s around the world. Online System Center offers now a multitenant SCCM as well as brower based Onrego Dashboard for SCOM and ITSM Service Management with orchestration capabilities.

Onrego’s Online System Center is a Microsoft System Center based systems management cloud service for managing devices such as workstations, laptops, mobile devices and tablets, for monitoring servers and services and to benefit from powerful ISTM Service Management with on-premises orchestration capabilities.

Onrego’s Online System Center is suitable for end customers and resellers but especially for Managed Service Providers (MSP’s) all around the world, who wants to use industry leading Microsoft System Center products in their service production.

Onrego’s Online System Center is managed using a browsed based portal.

Online System Center, Device Management

Onrego’s multitenant System Center Configuration Manager 2012 allows MSP’s to manage all of their end customers’ devices from one point with one management console but they can still give secured access to end customers and allow them to see the assets they have.

Adding new tenants (end customers) can be an easier task with Onrego’s Online System Center. Just click “Create New” in Onrego Portal and enter a name and a mail domain name for a new tenant and you are ready to go with automatically created unique client installation packages for each tenant you have.

Online System Center, Server and Service Monitoring

With Onrego’s Online System Center, Server and Service Monitoring cloud service, MSP’s can monitor all of their end customers’ servers and service no matter where the actual server are located: at the end customer’s datacenter, on your datacenter or on IaaS providers.

Using browsed based Onrego Dashboard, MPS’s and their end customer’s can monitor alerts, servers and services using any device from anywhere.

Online System Center, Service Management

Online System Center offers also a very poweful ITSM Service Management for MSP’s with ticketing features, self service portals and automation capabilities. Onrego’s Online System Center has a very unique feature: you can add on-premises orchestration components located at your end customer’s datacenter to Online System Center and gain increased profitability automating tasks and providing easy to use self service portals to your end customer’s end users.

All of the services included in Online System Center are suitable for MSP’s and resellers around the world. We can also offer white label version of Online System Center if you want rebrand the cloud service.

Please visit Online System Center website to learn more and contact Onrego Sales to book an online meeting to see a demo and to learn more about the possibilites Online System Center can do for your business!

The Future is Cloud Based!

December 10, 2012December 17, 20122 Comments

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.

Jarno

jarno.maki {at} onrego.fi

The Launch

November 1, 2012November 1, 20122 Comments

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!

Jarno

Express Yourself!

October 12, 20121 Comment

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.

The Onrego Working Methods

September 26, 2012September 26, 20121 Comment

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.