Cloud Hosting

Managed cloud hosting provider Hyve has enjoyed significant growth over the last few years, but what has been the secret to its success?

Hyve isnt your average cloud hosting provider. Based in Brighton, the sixteen-year old company started life as the part-time venture of Jon Lucas and Jake Madders, playing second fiddle before the two founderswent full time in 2010.

Madders early work on the company was carried out from the beaches of South America and, with a company jet ski and plans to buy a water-powered jet pack,Lucas and Madders could never be accused of conforming to what you might think of as thetraditional infrastructure IT image.

Indeed, the birth of the company itself was unique at the time. Hyve proudly calls itselfthe UKs first enterprise VMware cloud hosting provider and actually started before VMware even had a hosting model in place.

They didnt realise that they were going to make a load of money from hosting companies, so it was before they even provided a hosting reseller model, Madders explained to Silicon at Cloud Expo Europe. We bought a load of perpetual licenses and then virtualised everything that we had and in doing that our costs just disappeared.

We went from maybe 20,000-30,000 a month in costs down to 2,000 or 3,000 a month costs, but pretty much the same income. So thats when we thought we were on to something.

But growth didnt happen straight away. According to Madders, it was around 2012 that the company started to see real traction: People with dedicated servers, they just realised that cloud infrastructure works.

We had a period where we had to really persuade people to move to the cloud but they werent keen to trust it, then about 5 years ago everyone was suddenly moving and we had a great platform that we could scale so we didnt have any problems saying no. We could service pretty much anyone who called up.

In recent years, Hyve has gone from strength to strengthand now boasts the likes of Carluccios restaurant, T. M. Lewin and the RSPCA as customers. Arguably the most high-profile client is Southampton Football Club, which came on board in January as the club looked to revamp its digital platform.

So, with an influx ofcompetitors entering the market as more and more businesses turn to hosting providers to manage their cloud estates, what has been the secret to Hyves success and its 50 percent year-on-year growth?

Maddersputs a lot of it down to the personal touch that him and Lucas have been keen to retain throughout Hyves development: Customerscan phone us directly and because its a small team they can talk to our engineers without going through a big help desk which doesnt know who they are.

You can get in touch with a person, you know who they are and they know who you are and youre not going through to some help desk. Thats our man niche factor thats kept us in business and given us growth.

All of the competitors in our sector who offer close to as good a platform as us, are so big that youre going to have a help desk of a thousand. Theres no-one whos really our size who offers the same level of product as us.

Lucas agreed, saying that although retaining that personal touch has been a challenge, theyve come up with a solution: Every customer has got its own dedicated team, so we keep that team associated with one customer.

We always give the customer our phone number as well and say theres the mobile number if you need us for emergencies, give us a ring and weve now done that with account managers as well. That always closed the deal.

With an impressive roster of customers and a strong reputation to fall back on, the future is looking bright for Hyve.

Not only is the industry itself on the crest of a wave thats showing no signs of slowing, but there is also an interesting new group ofpotential customers in the market. Football teams are the biggest thing for us at the moment, said Madders.

All the Premier League clubs were stuck on one platform and theyve just been told that they can now do their own thing in IT, so theres this huge market rush right now to get them on board. Theyre not concernedabout budget, they just want it to be amazing and thats like the ultimate dream customer.

Hyve already has interest from two other Premier League teams (I pressed Madders and Lucas for names, but they wouldnt bite) and getting three of the UKs top football teams on board would represent a big win for the Brighton-based firm.

They also recently opened a new data centre in San Jose, California, to add to existing facilities in London, Somerset, Hong Kong and Shanghai, making Hyve a truly global company as it tries to compete with the industrys giants.

And, if it manages to retain that personal tough, theres no reason why Hyve wont continue to be an option for businesses on their cloud journeys.

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Link:
Hyve Brings A Personal Touch To Managed Cloud Hosting - Silicon UK