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)

Onrego Is Now a Cireson Premium Partner

December 17, 2013December 18, 20131 Comment

While Onrego has been recognized as an innovative cloud services company among our customers, we have also been recognized as a very skillful and agile ITSM company that creates value for our customers by using System Center Service Manager as a tool to solve their ITSM challenges. Now Onrego can create even more value for its customers because Onrego is now a Cireson Premium Partner. Read more!

Microsoft System Center Service Manager is a powerful and clever ITSM Service Management tool for incident management, problem resolution and for change and release control. It also has a self-service portal as well as automation and orchestration capabilities. Microsoft System Center Service Manager fully integrates to other System Center systems management tools such as System Center Configuration Manager for managing devices, System Center Operations Manager to monitor servers and services and System Center Orchestrator to implement automation workflows that can be integrated to self-service portal’s service requests.

Onrego‘s Online System Center is a globally available cloud service for such tasks that many end-customer organizations and managed service providers do find modern, agile and very useful to use in their daily IT operations. While the world in some cases is not yet cloud ready, Onrego also helps organizations to get benefits from Microsoft System Center portfolio from their on-premise datacenters.

Now, Onrego has become a Cireson Premium Partner. Cireson is a company that focuses on deliver more value to System Center Service Manager users in designing and producing great add-ons to it. For example, Cireson Asset Management extends the capabilities of System Center Service Manager by adding asset management features to it.

Another hot add-on from Cireson is Web Console, that allows organizations to use System Center Service Manager using a web browser, smartphone or tablet.

While Onrego has been recognized as an innovative cloud services company among our clients, we have also been recognized as a very skillful and agile ITSM company that creates value for our customers by using System Center Service Manager as a tool to solve their ITSM challenges.

Now Onrego can create even more value to customers with Cireson’s add-ons. We have already sold and implemented those add-ons and we can deliver demos and hassle-free proof-of-concepts from Online System Center cloud service. Cireson’s products can be implemented on Onrego’s Online System Center or on end-customer organization’s on-premises System Center Service Manager. Depending on how ready your world is for cloud services.

Please contact Onrego Sales for more information and please ask for a demo or PoC!

Greetings from ALSO Expo

October 21, 2013Leave a comment

Onrego attended ALSO Expo in Finland couple of weeks ago and made dozens of new contacts. Let’s summarize the expo with a few pics.

ALSO Finland, the biggest distributor in Finland, had it’s traditional ALSO Expo on October 10, 2013 in Tampere, Finland. Because the target audience for the expo was Finnish IT resellers and Managed Service Providers, Onrego attended the expo with it’s own booth. We made dozens of new contacts with meeting requests so I’d say the event was very successful for us.

There was also a couple of presentations and one of them was by Jukka Kortesniemi from ALSO. Jukka had a presentation concerning cloud services and what to expect from them in a near future.

Onrego had also a chance to attend Microsoft’s own pre-party at Klubi before ALSO’s own party after the expo. I’m very grateful to Mr. Jarkko Lainio from Microsoft Finland as he invited me to join him on the stage with Microsoft’s Mr. Markku Pulkkinen and Mr. Lasse Gerdt and to talk about Onrego and Onrego Online System Center and how Onrego benefits from being a Microsoft Gold Partner.

Finally, Also Expo ended with a much expected party with food and beverige. Evening’s special guest star was Jenni Vartiainen, the most popular female artist in Finland at the moment. What a great event!

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!

Also to Start Distributing Onrego Cloud Services

August 16, 2013August 16, 2013Leave a comment

Also Finland and Onrego has signed a contract in which Also starts to distribute Onrego Cloud Services in Finland. Also is the biggest distributor in Finland with 60 % market share and almost 2 000 active resellers over the country. Onrego’s Cloud Services are now available as well as for resellers but also for Managed Service Providers (MSP’s).

Also and Onrego has released a Press Release (in Finnish) about the contract between the two companies. Also starts to distribute Onrego Cloud Services to its Finnish resellers and MSP’s. For Also, this means a new add-on to Also Cloud concept and to Onrego, ability to reach large number of potential resellers and MPS’s.

As for the start-up of Also’s and Onrego’s cooperation, I had a chance to shake hand with Also Finland’s Managing Director Mrs. Mervi Airaksinen!

What does this mean to resellers and Managed Service Providers?

Most of the information for the resellers and MSP’s can be found from Also Cloud website, but I want to write down couple of reasons why Also’s almost 2000 resellers and MSP’s will benefit from the cooperation.

We have been seeing movement towards cloud services lately. Many corporations has been telling us that they are planning on moving everything to the cloud. And they mean everything from Active Directory to management tools. Another ones are telling us that they are expecting that most of their datacenter virtual machine workloads will be moved to hosters and IaaS providers in a near future.

In the mean time, governments of USA, UK, Australia and EU are driving Cloud First policies to accelerate cloud adoption.

For resellers, to be able to get Onrego Cloud Services through Also Finland, means that they can deliver Microsoft System Center products faster and more agile than ever before. It also means that resellers can benefit from the business model of cloud service. That means continuous monthly revenue.

We have been talking to number of Managed Service Providers too and we have seen a trend. A trend in which MSP’s no longer want to implement new tools (such as management ones) and spend lots of euros in investments, that has a flat payback time.

Managed Service Providers can benefit from Onrego’s Online System Center in their service production and stop spending valuable time in developing and maintaining tools for workstation management, server and service monitoring and service management.

Please learn more about the offering for resellers and Managed Service Providers from the Also Cloud website.

Service Monitoring and ITSM Breakfast Seminar @ Microsoft

June 13, 2013June 13, 2013Leave a comment

Our company Onrego kept a breakfast seminar yesterday together with Microsoft and Service-Flow Corporation. The focus was on Onrego Online System Center Operations Manager, how companies can benefit from it as an instant ready to use service monitoring system and on Service-Flow Corporation’s ITSM integration between numerous ITSM systems and Onrego Online System Center Service Manager. Let me summarize the event to you.

In my previous blog post, I wrote datacenter workloads are moving from organization’s datacenters to hosters and to IaaS cloud service providers. Couple of other trends we have seen within a year are: (1) companies does not have intelligent service (and server) monitoring systems and (2) companies are interested in owning their ITSM data rather than letting their MSP to own it because problems might arise when MSP is changed. Trend #2 also includes a note: many companies are interested in Microsoft System Center Service Manager as of ITSM system.

With these trends in mind and because our company Onrego do have quick and cost effective solutions for these trends (the answer is www.onlinesystemcenter.com by the way), we wanted to get together bunch of great people (read: customers) and have a breakfast seminar to cover these trends.

The breakfast seminar took place at Microsoft Finland, and started with a great keynote from Microsoft’s Juha Karppinen, Server & Tools Business Group Lead.

Juha talked about Cloud OS and Windows Server & System Center.

Juha’s presentations was followed by Onrego’s Pekka Onnela.

Pekka told us about cloud based System Center Operation Manager made available by Onrego and had couple of crazy demos of Onrego Dashboard, a browser based GUI to Service Monitoring via Microsoft System Center Operations Manager and Global Service Monitoring, a feature that lets you monitor your websites from all over the world.

After a quick pause, our partner, Service-Flow Corporation had their turn and Juha Berghäll and Kai Virkki entered the stage.

They gave couple of very nice demos how their cloud based ITSM Integration Service, which allows customers to use Onrego’s Online System Center Service Manager as their primary ITSM system, and automatically translate communication (such as tickets) to their MSP’s ITSM system. Service-Flow has done amazing job, since their online integration service handles ITSM systems such as ServiceNow, Efecte, BMC, Zendesk, and of course Microsoft System Center Service Manager. Service-Flow actually has online integrations to the largest Finnish MSP’s (CGI, Fujitsu, Atos and Tieto).

This means that when organizations want to have an online cloud based ITSM system (and they really do), they don’t need to take ServiceNow anymore. They can continue to use familiar Microsoft products because of Onrego’s Online System Center. And no matter if their MSP uses ServiceNow or BMC etc., integrations have already been made thanks to Service-Flow!

Onrego’s VP Kimmo Vesajoki ended the seminar and wished great summer time to attendees.

Thank you all the speakers and attendees!

Datacenter Workloads On the Run

June 5, 2013June 5, 20131 Comment

The State of Finland has nearly 190 datacenters in many of its government agencies and the plan is to centralize them and radically lower the number of datacenters. This is a part of a trend worth of examining.

Today, Finnish IT Journal Tietoviikko (http://www.tietoviikko.fi) released an article of Government of Finland is going to centralize its datacenters and cut down the current number of datacenters within Finnish government agencies. Most of the audience probably paid attention to the value of the plan. 240 million Euros. But what is more important to me, is that this is another proof of the trend we have in hand: datacenter workloads are on the run. This is already happening at the moment, and I’m betting we are seeing lots of consolidations and datacenter shutdowns in a near future. In my company Onrego, we have had a number of interesting meetings with clients, which are planning on shutting down their own datacenter(s) in couple of years and are going to move their workloads to hosters (such as Nebula in Finland), to co-location providers and/or to IaaS providers, such as Windows Azure. Although this trend is far more environmental friendish than each company running their own datacenters, the driving force is the money. Another driving force is technology. A few years ago we had no technology to extend the borders of datacenters, but the thing have changed. Microsoft’s President of the Server and Tools business, Satya Nadella, have written an email to Microsoft employees and he is willing to share it with all of us. By the way, rumor say that Satya is getting far larger role in Microsoft in a near future.

It’s only two years ago when I presented in the boardroom of my previous employer that the behavior of IT buyers is about to change. It’s going to change because of cloud. It started from consumer cloud services and is keep going on with enterprise ones. Consumerization in a little larger scale. When IT-buyers (and also IT-consumers such as end users) tend to get used to buy services (and devices) with cloudish pricing model (no upfront investments, pay as you go) in their private life, there is no way it would not affect to their professional life. Who would invest millions of dollars to a new datacenter with fixed ROI with no ability to cut down the costs when business is running poorly, when you have an option to buy just the amount of workloads you need, with no upfront investments and with pay as you go model? Another thing worth of mentioning is SaaS. One of our client said it right. All of their business apps have already gone to cloud. Why they still need their own servers and datacenters when all the services are delivered using the SaaS model? Because not everything is in the cloud what comes to IT infrastructure services. Not yet.

Meanwhile, check out Onrego’s Online System Center. We took the best management and monitoring products, turned them into the cloud and we are now serving them with no upfront investments and with pay as you go pricing model. It’s the service of cloud era, because you can manage your workstations and servers wherever they are and whoever owns them, and you can monitor your datacenter workloads, no matter in which datacenters they roam. And if you already have SaaS services, you should monitor the availability of them. Again, with Onrego Online System Center.

Onrego’s Multitenant SCCM for MSP’s

April 11, 2013September 28, 2015Leave a comment

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!

If you have any questions or you are intrested in Onrego’s services, please do not hesitate to contact us!

Onrego Closes Major Deal With Finnish Municipalities

March 1, 20131 Comment

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.

Please read more from the Press Releases:

In English:
http://onrego.com/news/7/53/Onrego-and-Centero-Closes-Major-Deal-With-Tiera-and-Finnish-Municipalities/

In Finnish:
http://onrego.fi/news/6/23/Tiera-Onrego-ja-Centero-solmivat-yhteistyoesopimuksen-kuntien-tyoeasemanhallintapalvelusta/

The original Press Release from Kuntien Tiera Oy can be found from here: http://www.tiera.fi/node/209

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

JarnoMaki.com

Cloud Services, Azure and Alpine Skiing

Tag: Online System Center