"To do what we do we really need a quality of infrastructure that is best-of-breed … high-speed, high-performance systems." Zero One general manager Suraj Keshvara

If pandemics or clogged roads are making your business look at the feasibility of working away from the office, the news is good. According to Suraj Keshvara, general manager of IT services provider Zero One, it's only getting easier for workers to be in one place and their computer infrastructure in another.

He should know. Providing all levels of managed IT services - from email to complete business systems - is precisely what Zero One does. And even before Zero One got into the market, Keshvara was closely involved in the development of the managed services model.

Zero One is owned by telco Compass Communications, whose ISP, voice, tolls and payment services businesses earn revenue of about $200 million a year. In 2006, it saw the opportunity to expand into the higher value IT services market.

It did so by acquisition, first taking over the business of GDC, a pioneer of the application service provider (ASP) market, which was in receivership. Keshvara and a partner ran a company that helped GDC develop its ASP offering and it, too, was bought by Compass.

The ASP computing model proved to be ahead of its time, and didn't last. A customer would access applications such as Microsoft Office on the service provider's computer, via a leased line or the internet. But that was the weak link - the telco services were either too slow or too expensive, requiring costly software workarounds.

"Then came the third acquisition, Zero One, which had been playing in the web hosting, web services sphere for 10 years, predominantly in Wellington," Keshvara says.

"It had some big clients - big name brands such as the All Blacks. It had developed the allblacks.com website and was hosting the site for the New Zealand Rugby Union, and had developed the online ordering system for Pizza Hut and was hosting that for Restaurant Brands.

"And it had some other high-calibre New Zealand entitities that it was providing services for as well."

It made sense to merge Zero One's web services business with the managed services business acquired from GDC, and that was done 18 months ago under the Zero One brand.

Underpinning the business is Compass' data centre, which has all the reliability and resilience needed to run a telecommunications company's operations. That includes dual power supplies, air-conditioning, fire suppression equipment and redundant data processing and storage systems.

IBM® has become Zero One's key supplier of servers and storage, as existing data centre hardware comes to the end of its economic life, and the company builds on the managed services business.

"We needed to make infrastructure decisions abut what technology platforms we were going to implement to replace big-ticket items like our storage area network. We went to market to see what options were out there and, from a technology perspective, IBM came up with the most compelling offering."

An important part of the new relationship, Keshvara says, is IBM's ability to supply cost-effective SAS storage systems at a fraction of the price of older-generation fibre-channel gear. In the future that will be paired with IBM's Storage SAN Volume Controller to give Zero One sophisticated storage management capabilities.

"To do what we do we really need a quality of infrastructure that is best-of-breed … high-speed, high-performance systems.

"The vast majority of our business is managed services," Keshvara says. "It's really taking a customer's IT infrastructure and hosting it in a data centre and delivering those services back to them, whereby they're maintained and managed by an expert party allowing the customer to focus on their core business."

That reduces their technical headaches and, in many cases, costs, Keshvara says.

On one level, it might be just hosting an organisation's email server. A step further up the food chain would involve managing desktop services such as Microsoft office. The ultimate service is having Zero One host business applications, such as a company's enterprise resource planning (ERP) system.

If it sounds remarkably like the ASP model all over again, Keshvara doesn't disagree. "It's all very much the same sort of service and delivery mechanism."

A couple of things have changed, though. First, today's catch-phrase for remotely delivered services is cloud computing, which has the respectability of being part of the offerings of industry heavyweights like IBM, Microsoft and Google.

And second, affordable, capable telco services are more readily available. The combination of today's faster networks, abundant processing power from virtualised blade servers, and speedy storage systems, means there's nothing to give away the fact that an organisation's staff might be on one side of town and their data processing on another.

What with one thing and another, Keshvara says remote access is getting a lot of customer attention. "That's another wonderful thing about our service - it provides people with a lot of options around what to do if swine flu hits their office."

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