CLOUD SERVICES

MDA Property Systems Case study

EOH Cloud Services

MDA Property Systems solves business-critical scalability challenges with EOH Cloud Services.

The ChallengeMDA Property Systems urgently needed to address the lack of scalability and agility of its existing platform, which was creating costly bottlenecks in their customer provisioning process.

The company was running a number of virtual machines on their platform, in order to deliver their cloud-based product to their customers. Quick provisioning of new virtual machines is a crucial element of MDA Property System's service delivery value proposition, so the bottlenecks had begun to severely damage their ability provision for their customers.

A secondary requirement was to improve the company's backup capabilities and gain more control over them.

MDA Property Systems, founded in 1990, is an acknowledged leader in the �eld of developing and implementing specialised property management systems. The company has more than 4 000 users at over 400 sites across Africa and the Middle East.

Its core product, MDA Property Manager, is mainly used by owners and managers of retail, o�ce, industrial and residential property portfolios. It is a comprehensive property management software package. It covers the full spectrum from the basics of rent or levy collection, integrated accounting to strategic asset management for property and real estate portfolios.

EOH Cloud Services used its highly �exible approach to build a customised cloud-based virtualisation environment to cater for MDA Property Systems' speci�c requirements.

The Solution EOH Cloud Services used its highly �exible approach to build a customised cloud-based virtualisation environment to cater for MDA Property Systems' speci�c requirements. EOH �rst migrated the company to a VMWare platform – a challenge in itself. It required a thorough migration, moving the company from its existing platform to a global best-of-breed one. The EOH team was able to solve all migration issues in record time. This expertise proved critical, as this type of migration hadn't been undertaken before. EOH also took over the Citrix, RDS and SQL licensing, managing it on behalf of MDA Property Systems.

At the end of this process, MDA Property Systems was up and running with an EOH Managed Hosted Cloud solution, a scalable, self-service virtualised platform, which is the foundation upon which other Cloud-based services can be delivered.

In the case of MDA Property Systems, this took the form of a Software-as-a-Service model, to replace the previous on-site approach.

EOH Cloud Backup was implemented as the solution to the company's backup requirements. It allows MDA Property Systems to fully manage their own backup schedule and parameters.

Redundancy is provided by replicating critical data in the EOH Data Centre, a Tier 3 facility running on a Layer 2 network. This gives the company rapid failover capabilities.

The ResultsMDA Property Systems now has the scalability it needs to service their customers and deliver on their brand promise. It can increase the size and number of virtual machines on the �y, with simultaneous SaaS provisioning and implementation on them. The company is now capable of true rapid provisioning for their customers.

Moreover, this has allowed the company to move away from on-site provisioning, and to fully embrace the SaaS model. MDA Property Systems aims to signi�cantly ramp up SaaS use, and convert their own customers from on-premise to SaaS.

The entire solution is fully self-service enabled, giving the company more control and improved e�ciency. New solution provisioning work�ows, with cost approval processes, provides improved cost visibility.

The redundancy capabilities assist in risk mitigation, disaster recovery, and business and customer service continuity. MDA Property Systems can spin up additional virtual machines very rapidly if needed.

Overall the solution deployment was complex, with speci�c problems that needed to be solved for the migration process to be successful. EOH played the role of a constant trusted advisor, supporting MDA Property Systems throughout.

The company now has a fully managed cloud solution that is completely under their control. It is supported by 24/7 expertise, technical ability and, crucially, strategic insight, directed at ful�lling its future business goals.

The entire solution is fully self-service enabled, giving the company more control and improved e�ciency.

The Bene�ts At the highest level, there is now a powerful strategic alliance between EOH and MDA Property Systems. EOH expended a lot of time and e�ort to thoroughly understand the company's business, its strategic aims and its future direction. The outcome is a solution that was purpose-built to facilitate these.

MDA Property Systems now also enjoys a strong brand association with EOH. As leaders in their own �eld they desired to partner with similar industry leaders. Furthermore, working with a company that has the necessary corporate governance in place satis�es an important requirement for MDA Property Systems.

Operationally, MDA Property Systems has gained a powerful level of agility, �exibility and scalability in the services it o�ers to its clients. It can deploy much faster, and is able to guarantee its clients higher levels of uptime. The advanced backup capabilities

allow MDA Property Systems to provide a very solid and reliable service to their clients, which improves customer retention.Improved costing visibility gives deeper insight that further allows the company to be more agile and �exible. It can respond to demands immediately, rather than having to plan for months in advance.

Finally, a signi�cant business bene�t is that MDA Property Systems now has constant access to a team of world-class specialists, particularly in Citrix and cloud networking, to ensure optimal solution performance.

EOH Cloud Services

+27 11 607 8100, info@eoh.co.zaEOH Business Park, Gillooly’s View,

1 Osborne Lane, Bedfordview, 2007, South Africawww.eohcloud.co.za