EOH’s success stems from the strength of its cloud service offerings, established expertise in the applications space, and a strategic focus on end-to-end solutions offerings

Based on its recent analysis of the cloud computing market, Frost & Sullivan recognises EOH Cloud Services with the 2013 South African Award for Customer Value Enhancement. EOH’s flagship offeringin the cloud computing market is a completely scalable, highly elastic and fully managed hybrid cloud solution. This infrastructure as a service solution provides customers with a configurable environment to provision their workloads.

EOH’s solution has a built-in self-service portal that allows customers to manage their environment, select their own infrastructure configuration, and choose the platforms and software they would like to run on it. While the managed hosted cloud offering utilises shared resources in the form of a multi-tenant environment, EOH offers managed private cloud options, hosted in its data centre, using either customer-dedicated equipment or customer-owned equipment. Furthermore, the company provides a completely private cloud environment, located on customer premises, using its cloud manager orchestration engine that runs on the customer’s equipment.

The EOH Cloud Manager provides a single point of interface and a holistic view of the entire cloud infrastructure. Through this tool, the customer can access a variety of functions ranging from infrastructure provisioning, workflow integration, as well as cost visibility and control.

“One of the most important and unique attributes of the cloud manager is its ability to enable cloud bursting,” said Frost & Sullivan’s Industry Analyst Ishe Zingoni. “It allows the user to deploy workloads in multiple data centres. For example, customers are able to burst into EOH’s managed hosted cloud environment when their on-premise environment is full.”

Through EOH’s solution, customers can make use of their own infrastructure and simultaneously gain access to an unlimited pool of resources in EOH’s cloud environment. This hybrid cloud solution, therefore, offers the price, capacity and provisioning speed of a public cloud, while maintaining the security and governance required for sensitiveinformation.

EOH augments its primary cloud offerings with a rich assortment of complementary services in areas such as security,backup, collaboration, disaster recovery, mobility and virtual desktop. The company has a well-balanced portfolio, comprising of its core cloud hosted offerings and an evolving selection of key offerings that will allowEOH to benefit from key trends such as mobility, remote working and bring-your-own device (BYOD). It is through this forward-looking strategic perspective that EOH has managed to grow its business consistently, and become the best performing ICT company on the JSE in 2013 over the past five years.

EOH also relies on its competitive strength in the applications domain, evidenced by its market-leading position as a partner for software vendors. At present, EOH offers software licences on a flat model, running in its cloud environment. It expects Software as a Service (SaaS) to be one of the most important cloud computing areas in future and hence, will continue to strengthen its capabilities in this area.

“With the trend of outsourcing gaining steam, enterprises are increasingly evaluating third-party services such as cloud computing, hosting and managed services - all key areas of strength for EOH,” noted Ishe Zingoni. “Customers are drawn to EOH’s ability to fully understand their entire IT environment and needs in a more holistic manner,making it the end-to-end managed hosted cloud provider of choice.”

Each year, Frost & Sullivan presents this award to the company that has demonstrated excellence in implementing strategies that proactively create value for its customers and improve their return on investment. The award recognizes the company's focus on enhancing the value that its customers receive, beyond simply good customerservice, leading to improved customer retention and ultimately customer base expansion.

Frost & Sullivan Best Practices awards recognize companies in a variety of regional and global markets for demonstrating outstanding achievement and superior performance in areas such as leadership, technological innovation, customer service and strategic product development. Industry analysts compare market participants and measure performance through in-depth interviews, analysis and extensive secondary research to identify best practices in the industry.