Microsoft Azure and VMware diversification strategy pays off

Cloud and IT transformation specialist Parallo has been formally recognised after receiving four new major competencies from its core partners, VMware and Microsoft.

Known for its origins designing, building and managing large-scale VMware infrastructure, Parallo has confirmed its specialist status, being the first company in New Zealand to achieve a VMware Master Services Competency. This recognises the business’s outstanding expertise in data centre virtualisation as well as a strong focus on building specialist skills.

In addition, Parallo’s strategic expansion into App Transformation, DevOps and Site Reliability Engineering exclusively on Microsoft Azure five years ago has earned it Gold Partner competencies in Application Development and DevOps, as well as Silver competencies in ISV and Datacenter to build on its existing Microsoft Gold Partner competency in Cloud Platform.

Parallo is arguably the leading VMware partner in ANZ and is also leading the charge in delivering everything as code. “We believe we are market leaders in the delivery of outsourced Infrastructure and operations management that is both cost effective and delivers high customer satisfaction. Our services enable customers to fully leverage their investment and to focus on highly visible activities valued by the business,” said Parallo chief executive, Symon Thurlow.

The drive to deliver the best possible solutions spurred Parallo to branch out from managing on-premises infrastructure, to modernising and transforming apps and platforms with Microsoft Azure.“We wanted to help Software as a Service (SaaS) companies and Independent Software Vendors (Software companies) more effectively, and we realised that we needed to be more development-focused to enable them to move their services off on-premise infrastructure to Microsoft Azure,” Thurlow said.

We’re now committed to transforming apps – not just moving servers to the cloud but enabling our customers to get the best from it. We had to have software engineering capability to do that.”

Sarah Bowden, Microsoft Director of Commercial and Partner Business, said Parallo’s strong focus on Azure has given it a rare depth of skills and experience as well as a reputation for excellence, establishing itself as a trusted Azure specialist.

“To achieve success on this scale, our partners need to demonstrate that they truly understand their customers’ business challenges and how investment in the right IT infrastructure can help streamline business operations,” Bowden said.

Thurlow said his goal in future was building on Parallo’s partnership with Microsoft to further develop the Parallo Automation Library (PAL). PAL is the collection of five years of IP learned from operating Azure at scale for Parallo’s SaaS and ISV customers.

“PAL is currently an Azure app available only to Parallo customers. PAL automatically optimises our customers’ Azure environments, detecting sub-optimal conditions, making automated corrective actions, providing enhanced scaling, spend alerting and many other features. Fundamentally PAL ensures that security, performance, availability and cost are optimised for our customers, so that their own customers’ experience is always optimal.

“Our goal is to make this available to all Azure users, which would not only significantly enhance our business but allow many more organisations to avoid highly preventable disruptions to their service. We will also add VMware functionality to PAL soon,” added Thurlow.