Download PDF
Ekaru’s Partnership with Continuum Ensures No Client is Left Behind
Technology Category
- Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Connectivity Platforms
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - API Integration & Management
- Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Data Management Platforms
Applicable Industries
- Professional Service
- Software
Applicable Functions
- Business Operation
- Field Services
Use Cases
- Remote Asset Management
- Remote Control
- Predictive Maintenance
Services
- System Integration
- Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
- Cybersecurity Services
The Challenge
Ekaru faced the challenge of providing comprehensive, 24x7 IT support and services to a growing customer base. The episodic nature of IT demands made it difficult to maintain a properly-sized staff without inflating labor costs. Ekaru needed a solution that could handle peak loads of customer requests efficiently and ensure that all clients received timely support. Additionally, Ekaru required a partner that could offer continuous monitoring and troubleshooting to minimize downtime and maintain network and device health.
About The Customer
Ekaru is a small IT services company based in Westford, Massachusetts. Founded by Ann Westerheim, Ekaru aims to make IT systems a strategic asset for businesses, allowing them to focus on their core operations. The company provides a broad range of technical knowledge and business technology perspectives to help clients plan their IT growth as their businesses expand. Ekaru's mission is to keep business systems running smoothly and to deliver a deep and broad skill set, enabling clients to stop worrying about technology and concentrate on their core business activities.
The Solution
Ekaru partnered with Continuum to leverage their fully-integrated Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM) and Network Operations Center (NOC) platform, along with a U.S.-based Help Desk. Continuum's Help Desk, staffed with over 125 technicians, provides level 1-2 support to more than 45,000 end users via phone, email, and web-based chat. This service is white-labeled, allowing Ekaru to offer a custom-branded experience to their customers. The NOC team at Continuum works behind the scenes to monitor client network and device health, minimize downtime, and troubleshoot server issues, often completing work overnight or after hours. This ensures that Ekaru's customers experience minimal disruption and can quickly return to normal operations.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
Related Case Studies.
Case Study
Factor-y S.r.l. – Establishes a cost-effective, security-rich development environment with SoftLayer technology
Factor-y S.r.l., a web portal developer, was faced with the challenge of migrating its development infrastructure to a reliable cloud services provider with highly responsive technical support. The company needed a solution that would not only provide a secure and reliable environment but also support its expansion by providing resources to create and deliver innovative offerings.
Case Study
UBM plc: Taking the pulse of the business and engaging employees with a far-reaching strategic transformation
UBM, a leading global events business, was undergoing a significant strategic transformation named 'Events First'. As part of this transformation, the company was preparing to complete the largest acquisition in its history - Advanstar, a US-based events and marketing services business valued at more than USD970m. The company faced the risk of human capital flight if it was unable to effectively engage top talent with the new strategic direction. UBM needed to make significant structural, process and systems changes, uniting its previously autonomous regional businesses. The challenge was to ensure all of its employees were engaged and aligned with the new future vision.
Case Study
Darwin Ecosystem: Accelerating discovery and insight through cutting-edge big data and cognitive technologies
Darwin Ecosystem was founded with a unique vision of harnessing chaos theory mathematics to uncover previously hidden connections in unstructured data. The company’s algorithms can look at all the data generated by any source (such as news, RSS feeds and Twitter), and analyze how a specific set of concepts within that data are evolving over time. This is particularly valuable in situations such as business and competitive intelligence, social research, brand monitoring, legal discovery, risk mitigation and even law enforcement. A common problem in these areas is that a regular web search will only turn up the all-time most popular answers to a given question – but what the expert researcher is actually interested in is the moment-tomoment evolution of the data available on that topic. Darwin’s algorithm is computationally intensive, and the sources of data it correlates can be vast. To bring its benefits to a larger commercial audience, Darwin needed to find a way to make it scale.
Case Study
Wittmann EDV-Systeme launches IT monitoring services
Small and medium-sized businesses often lack the know-how and resources required for thorough IT system monitoring. Wittmann EDV-Systeme wanted to launch a solution to plug the gap – enabling it to improve its own competitiveness and that of its customers. IT landscapes are becoming ever more complex and outsourcing is gaining popularity, IT systems must nonetheless remain easy-to-use and extremely reliable at all times. Automated, round-the-clock system monitoring therefore represents an immensely valuable proposition for companies: downtime for business-critical applications can be avoided, and IT systems remain available at all times.
Case Study
Zend accelerates, simplifies PHP development
Zend Technologies, a major contributor to the PHP open source community, needed to keep pace with emerging trends such as mobility, agile development, application lifecycle management and continuous delivery. The company needed to provide the right tools to the worldwide community of PHP developers. The challenge was to support enterprise-class capabilities from end to end, including mobile, compliance and security. The pace of business required developers to show results fast across a variety of devices without compromising quality or security.
Case Study
Delivering modern data protection with cloud scale backup from Cobalt Iron and IBM
Organizations are struggling to modernize their legacy data protection environments in the face of growing demands around new infrastructure, new applications, and budget consolidation. Virtualization and modern application development processes have significantly outgrown legacy backup architectures. In response, infrastructure teams have created multiple backup solution types to handle the varying SLAs (performance, scale, cost) required by their business sponsors. However, the sheer number and variety of solutions in this uncontrolled expansion creates huge amounts of work, threatening to overwhelm the IT team in many organizations. Today, developers may add new applications and virtual server instances by the hundreds per day without accounting for the restrictions of the existing backup infrastructure. They leverage the cloud for immediate compute and storage resources, yet rarely communicate succinctly with corporate IT to ensure that the appropriate data protection services are in place.
