Macquarie Telecom wants to be known as the country's leading SaaS hosting company – an ambition boosted after winning the deal for BMC's helpdesk tool.
According to BMC, users of its Remote product in Australia & New Zealand were calling for SaaS delivery, but with a model that addressed issues of data sovereignty.
Chip Salyards, BMC’s vice president in Asia Pacific, said: "It was a lengthy and complex process, and we started with a list of 17 potential vendors."
According to BMC, two of the most important criteria were high availability and security. Helpdesk files often contain sensitive data, such as confidential medical records and bank account numbers, so rigorous security was a must.
Remedy was previously being previously hosted in the US; by hosting the application across two of MacTel's data centres in Canberra and Macquarie Park, Sydney, transaction speeds have been boosted by up to ten times.
MacTel` sales and marketing director Luke Clifton, said the BMC deal was evidence of its sharp focus on expanding in SaaS hosting, a business growing at "double digits".
Three years ago, MacTel looked at where it could expand to avoid competing with the "big goliaths in the hosting world", such as Amazon Web Services and Rackspace.
"Our traditional bread-and-butter customers – corporate IT – were 80 percent of our business, but underneath that, we discovered that we were the number one SaaS hosting provider and we didn't even know it," Clifton told CRN.
MacTel now has more than 100 SaaS clients in Australia, including Symantec, McAfee, Rubik and Micronet Systems.
"Importantly, we don't sell SaaS, but we provide the infrastructure for SaaS companies who are looking for partners to provide infrastructure for them to take their product out to market. We stop at the operating layer."
Clifton said SaaS companies were "high touch" customers." It is not a set and forget; a SaaS company needs a lot of interaction. They need access to qualified tier-three engineers over the phone 24/7. They need to be able to pick up the phone and reboot a server or expand an internet port."
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