Headquartered in Sweden, the IIOX cloud-based platform collects, harmonizes, aggregates and distributes machine data in real time, turning data into useful insight and knowledge. Its customers include energy supplier E.ON and companies in automatic meter reading and the agricultural sector.
IIOX has been a Basefarm customer for a number of years and has been extremely satisfied with the quality of the service delivery. But with its contract up for renewal and the recent acquisition of Basefarm by Orange Business, the company was open to a new solution that would support its expansion plans. Up until this point, IIOX had a server infrastructure from Basefarm, which was managed in-house and could not scale geographically.
IIOX was looking for a secure, scalable, fully-managed platform that supported a container orchestration system, having redesigned their applications to use Kubernetes. It also wanted to avoid any vendor lock-in or upfront costs.
At the same time, they wanted to move to a fully managed system, so they could concentrate on their core business and not have to worry about retaining in-house skills. They tried Flexible Engine, our innovative solution based on OpenStack, and they liked its flexibility, scalability and security features.
IIOX is starting its Flexible Engine deployment in Europe, with plans to deploy to other regions. Basefarm is managing the local initiative in the Nordics, with Orange Business providing global support. As well as Flexible Engine services, such as Kubernetes and Apache Kafka stream processing, there will also be a fully-managed Cassandra distributed database from Orange Business.
This will work around the pay-as-you-go model that IIOX was looking for. Orange Business also reassured IIOX regarding compliance that could arise from globalizing the solution.
Avoiding vendor lock-in
Designed to help migrate applications to the cloud, Flexible Engine is based on OpenStack technology and public cloud services infrastructure.
As the cloud market consolidates, vendor lock-in is a growing concern for enterprises, according to IDC’s information technology predictions for 2019. IDC believes that as part of this trend, enterprises will look for providers that can integrate multi-cloud services. OpenStack, unlike Amazon AWS or Microsoft Azure, supports a number of proprietary technologies and can successfully operate in bare metal and hypervisor environments.
When it comes to OpenStack and Kubernetes – they are seen as a great match. According to Openstack.org, OpenStack now runs the largest number of enterprise network and storage systems, allowing containers to be seamlessly integrated into the enterprise environment.
IIOX is on trend. Enterprise interest in the applications container market continues to grow, driven by enterprises looking to manage infrastructures more efficiently and meet their digital transformation goals on time. 451 Research believes the applications container market will hit more than $2.1 billion this year and more than $4.3 billion in 2022.
Moving forward
IIOX is one of the first joint deals for Orange Business and Basefarm, highlighting the large portfolio of services directly through a console pay-as-you-go mode. At the same time, it underscores the power of local control and global reach that will support IIOX in its ambitious expansion plans as the industry appeal of IoT rapidly accelerates.
Joakim Karlsson, based in Stockholm, Sweden, is the Business Development Manager covering Cloud Business in the Nordic region. He has been in the IT industry for 20 years – nine of those years at Microsoft – and his extensive experience is an asset in helping Orange customers navigate the cloud domain. In his spare time, Joakim likes to golf, play paddle tennis and spend time with his family and friends.