ICT Service Provider Expands Cloud Offerings and Grows Customer Base 20 Percent Each Year with Veeam

The Business Challenge

MPY Palvelut Oyj is one of Finland’s most successful ICT service providers and hosting partners for one simple reason. MPY guarantees customers’ data is secure and available whenever they need it.

“Our business strategy is to offer the best customer experience in our industry,” said Sampo Suojala, Solutions Architect at MPY. “If a customer requires 24.7.365 access to data—and almost all of them do—that’s what we provide.”

MPY’s customers require constant access to data because demand for their products and services never stops. Customers include local governments, service companies, energy firms and food and beverage manufacturers. Suojala said providing constant access hasn’t always been easy.

“Legacy backup was unreliable and inflexible, so delivering this level of access was time-consuming,” he explained. “We spent a lot of time troubleshooting backup failures because backup only succeeded 75 percent of the time. And, building backup infrastructures for customers was time-consuming because few tasks were automated.”

While MPY was able to meet service level agreements (SLAs) with customers, Suojala worried about being able to meet them as the company grew and acquired new customers.

“Risking customer satisfaction is never an option,” he said. “If a hosting provider can’t deliver continuous access to customers’ data, they will look for a new ICT partner. That’s why we looked for a new backup solution.”

The Veeam Solution

MPY replaced legacy backup with Veeam® Backup & Replication™.

“Veeam supports our business strategy to offer the best customer experience possible in our industry by ensuring data is always available,” Suojala said.

MPY’s backup success rate increased to 100 percent with Veeam, and Suojala said that was just the beginning of the benefits.

“Veeam helps us create new revenue opportunities that grow our customer base by 20 percent each year,” he explained. “Veeam also helps us onboard new customers faster. We save approximately 20 hours each week because Veeam automates availability. We use that time to prepare our IT infrastructure for additional business growth.”

Suojala said new revenue opportunities include backup as a service (BaaS), disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS), verified recoverability, and self-service backup and restore for VMware vCloud Director.

“Veeam enables us to provide competitive offerings to a broad range of customers, and we’re completely confident we can meet SLAs without the effort and time required by legacy backup.”

Veeam is the powerhouse behind MPY’s BaaS and DRaaS. Customers with onpremises virtual machines (VMs) send their backup copies and replicas to MPY’s secure cloud via Veeam Cloud Connect. If their critical systems fail, MPY recovers them from the cloud almost instantly.

“Veeam standardises offsite backup and replication, making it practical for all customers,” Suojala said.

Finland’s well-known bakery company was grateful to MPY when critical baking systems failed. MPY used a Veeam feature called Instant VM Recovery® to recover the systems from backup copies in its cloud. Baking resumed normally, and there was no impact on the business.

“Data is our customers’ greatest asset,” Suojala. “Thanks to Veeam we can make their data available around the clock.”

Suojala said several customers require verification that their backups are recoverable, including one of the country’s leading law firms. Law firms are required to save data for long periods of time because it may be needed in future court cases. A Veeam feature called SureBackup® tests the recoverability of backups, giving the law firm peace of mind that data is always available.

“We wouldn’t have acquired that law firm as a customer without Veeam,” Suojala said. “SureBackup helps us differentiate ourselves from competing hosting providers.”

The Results

• Creates new revenue opportunities and strengthens the customer experience
  “Veeam makes it easy to offer BaaS and DRaaS in a fast-growing cloud services market,” Suojala said. “BaaS and DRaaS are important components of 24.7.365 availability.”
• Grows customer base by 20 percent per year
  “Veeam supports our business strategy to offer the best customer experience in the ICT sector,” Suojala said. “The proof is in our 20 percent growth rate each year.”
• Improves customer onboarding speed
  “Building backup infrastructures for new customers is faster and easier with Veeam,” Suojala said. “Automation has increased our onboarding speed significantly.”