Welcome

As Christmas draws near, I welcome you to the latest issue of our quarterly newsletter for the industry analyst community.

In this newsletter we are bringing you an insight to market trends in Latin America in the mining industry, and a view of the interest across the globe for Virtual Desktop Infrastructure. Also, find out if users think moving to managed services leaves room for more innovation in IT, and we feature excerpts from the VP of Strategic Solutions at CA Technologies who shares some interesting highlights to ‘the real world of cloud service providers’.

May I take this opportunity to wish you all season's greetings and a very happy new year to you and your families.

Kind regards

Joanne James
VP International Marketing
Logicalis

Click here for Jo’s Twitter page

Regional Insights

Mining in Latin America

Desktop virtualization, storage, collaboration and outsourcing are among the hottest ICT areas in the mining industry in Latam. Desktop virtualization brings mobility and connectivity from any device everywhere inside the mine, from management to operations and quality sectors. Most mining companies already have some experience with server virtualization and they can leverage that platform. But some of them have gone one step beyond, already operating private clouds.

Storage is another hot area, since mining companies are required by law to generate a lot of information records, either for security, quality or even environmental programmes. Video surveillance, positive ID and other types of controls contribute to this trend.

In addition, Collaboration technologies have benefited from an increased interaction between head offices and branches in the last few months. Despite that, the use of collaboration for production purposes is still nascent.

Lastly, outsourcing of support functions is growing steadily. Mining companies today prefer to focus on their core business and cut back on support personnel, in particular regarding Help Desk, Basic Support (Switches, Wireless, Printing) and Platform Support (in agreement with the software vendor and through a partner).

VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure)

Logicalis has seen very strong interest for VDI in the US market and have a number of closed opportunities, and will be rolling this out in the form of a cloud-as-a-service solution.

This interest spreads to other regions, such as Europe, South America and Asia Pacific.

In our UK market, we’ve seen customers ‘lured’ in by the thought of VDI – but it does not seem to currently cost out for most of them. However, we think that the ‘bring your own IT’ culture will ultimately drive a thin model of delivery.

VDI Technology Solutions from Logicalis can deploy virtual desktops across a wide array of platforms that all share a common look and feel.

Reason 1: Hard Cost Savings
It’s simple, thin clients cost less than their beefy desktop or notebook counterparts, they last longer, often six to seven years versus four years for a notebook, and they consume a fraction of the energy of a desktop computer – as low as 10 to 15 watts for thin clients vs. 150 watts for desktops, a significant power reduction!
Reason 2: Ease of Management
How much IT staff time is spent patching individual desktops and notebooks? How much time is spent on system and application upgrades? How much end user downtime is due to refresh cycles? Thin clients are easier to patch and upgrade. Plus they have slower generational changes than PCs, so you’re not swapping out newer versions all the time. And because all your users’ data and applications are centralised, using VDI makes it vastly easier to put in place better processes and procedures to ensure security, privacy and other best practices.
Reason 3: Centralised Backups
How much IT staff time is spent providing backups or recovering data for individual desktops and notebooks? How many times have you told end users they need to backup data or they run the risk of losing critical information? With virtual desktops, every thin client is backed up centrally.
Reason 4: Productivity Gains
VDI encourages teleworking, which contributes to higher productivity, increased morale and reduced office space expenses, while decreasing demands on help desks; if there are problems, it’s easier to troubleshoot standard images and integrate applications with standard hardware, end users need less training with standard images.

Logicalis is currently working with a wide range of customers on proof-of-concept test cases that create a fully functional VDI environment. These include everything from establishing standards, to providing multi-user VMware View licenses, to building the data centre environment with appropriate storage and server capacities, to creating server and desktop images for thin clients and then giving end users a chance to put VDI to the test over time.

We know that VDI isn’t for everyone or every situation. Power users who require several specialised applications or work with large, complex files are not a good fit for VDI. And we know that “one size fits all” is not a sound VDI strategy either. That’s why our Logicalis IT Business Advisors will work with customers to understand specific environments and requirements. A plan will then be developed to fit an organisation’s specific needs.

Logicalis VDI feature story click here

Logicalis VDI video click here

Click here to request a briefing about these announcements.

Managed Services

Logicalis’ international Managed Services capability spans Communications, Data Centre and Cloud Services, with discrete service offerings supported by a quality ITILv3 service management framework and common Service Catalogue.

In a recent Logicalis blog we highlighted the issue: “ Does moving to managed services leave room for more innovation in IT?” and asked users “What do you think about managed services? Are you using it to free up your internal team for more strategic projects”

Logicalis Managed services and cloud solutions make good financial sense. Click here to view this video.

If you would like to request a briefing for our Managed Services, please click here.

10 things to learn about Cloud

A recent visit from the VP Strategic Solutions at CA Technologies to our Cloud demo suite in Slough, UK, prompted some interesting highlights to ‘the real world of cloud service providers’. CA is an IT management software and solutions company and leader in cloud services automation - from his observations, these are some excerpts from the VP’s blog:

Note that these are just extracts from the blog by Andi Mann, VP of Strategic Solutions at CA Technologies. To read the full blog click here

Corporate information

For further information, Logicalis has released its latest Annual Report for 2011 (click here to see it).

Click here for the company’s history.
Click here to see the company’s international presence.
Click here to see the company’s awards.
Click here to see the company’s Executive Team.
Click here to see the company’s Corporate Social Responsibility policy.
Click here for Investor Relations.

Logicalis’ solutions

Click here to see Logicalis' solutions or click here to see case studies.

Professional and Managed Services

Click here or click here for related case studies.

Unified Communications and Collaboration

Click here or click here for related case studies.

Each topic above features articles of Logicalis in the news, related videos and a spotlight on our Data Centre, Innovation Centre, etc.

Press releases: 1 Sept to 30 Nov 2011

Social media: Links

Joanne James, VP International Marketing,
Logicalis, 110 Buckingham Avenue, Slough, Berkshire, SL1 4PF, United Kingdom

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