Business background
Smart IT is a specialist provider of essential IT services, including an ERP product called Odoo. In the last 2-3 years, they have tripled in size by developing and implementing the Odoo product for various clients, ranging from small businesses of only 5-6 users, up to larger businesses with 300+ users.
The challenge
Previously, Smart IT did some hosting for their Odoo clients with another provider, however, the issue they had was scaling up their offering as they grew their client base.
Jonathan Bullen, Owner of Smart IT commented, “We didn’t come to Hyve to use their service for a single product or client, we’re using their hosting for a variety of individual clients.”
The model the previous provider used was to rent whole blades and fill them up with clients, and once a blade was full, they would have to rent another blade. This created a peak and a trough business model, where the hosting would just start to become profitable, but then they would have to go and rent another blade, meaning upfront costs would increase hugely.
Essentially, Smart IT didn’t want to go through all of that each time they grew their customer base; they wanted a way to grow organically while not demanding too much capital expenditure upfront, to avoid making dents in their profit margins.
Bullen, continued, “Like most people in our industry, we wanted speed, reliability and good support; being able to get through to the right people at the right time when you need support was very important for us. We knew Hyve would tick all of these boxes.”
The solution
After consultation with Hyve’s experts, Smart IT opted for an enterprise cloud solution to suit their needs. Odoo is built on Postgres databases, so Hyve’s specialised technical team came up with a solution to manage the replication of databases between data centres. One of Smart IT’s own customers also required a disaster recovery solution, so Hyve quickly came up with a suitable solution to fit those needs.
Bullen commented, “The solution that Hyve came up with to be able to rent individual VMs for our clients on a piece-by-piece basis really suited us as it just meant that we could purchase the hosting for clients as and when we onboarded them. We didn’t have to make a big investment every few months as our client base grew.
The results
Smooth
migration
400%
growth in clients
24/7/265
support
The process of moving clients from Smart IT’s previous hosting went smoothly and was completed within a matter of weeks.
Bullen commented, “Hyve provided the access to service as promised, it was exactly what we asked for and did the job. The support team have been very good, we’ve had no problems at all. We tend to find that when we put a support ticket in it gets answered really quickly. The guys in the support team are great. Depending on the issue, we tend to get talking to the correct person within the correct timescales every time.”
When Smart IT first moved to Hyve, they had around five clients using the hosting service. Just shy of two years later, they are now close to 25 clients, with some of their larger clients using the disaster recovery solution too.
Bullen concluded, “The greatest benefit of our partnership with Hyve is the knowledge that we can carry on growing as long as they keep providing that hosting for us as and when we need it. If you’re looking for good solid hosting with solid support then Hyve is the partner to go to!”
