Cisco Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud 4.3.2 Information Guide

 

 

© 2013 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information. 

Page 1 of 4 

Customer Case Study 

Customer Name: ASE IT 

Industry: Technology 

Location: Sydney, Australia 

Number of Employees: 10+ 

●  Support business growth by supplying IT 

services rapidly to new and existing 
customers 

●  Deploy new customers and services quickly 

without rapid increase in staffing 

●  Keep staff morale high by increasing data 

center efficiency, and reducing routine tasks 
and on-call time windows 

●  Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud 

●  Time for design to deployment of customer 

solutions reduced from weeks to hours, with 
time to build virtual machine reduced from 8 
hours to 15 minutes 

●  Can confidently accommodate new customers 

and expand business globally 

●  Technical staff focusing on strategic 

challenges instead of routine, time-consuming 
tasks 

 

IT Provider Uses Automation to Stay Lean While 
Expanding Business 

Business Challenge 

Some of the largest companies on the Australia Securities Exchange 

have chosen ASE IT for their cloud solutions provider. ASE has had 
a major impact on the country’s technology landscape in a relatively 

short period of time. Founded in 2001, ASE is an excellent example 

of how smaller companies can use data center automation to gain a 

fair chance to compete effectively. That perception is substantiated 

by the 2012 Longhaus Research Report, which ranked ASE IT as 

one of the top-ten service providers in Australia. The report 

comp

ares Australia’s 150+ cloud providers and ranks them 

according to detailed analysis of each company’s products, services, 

and security, focusing on customer trust and satisfaction. 

Achieving this degree of success and recognition is a validation of 

several important strategic decisions by the ASE management team. 

Perhaps the most important of these decisions occurred in 2006 

when the company moved toward delivery of services in the cloud. 
“We knew that we were ahead of the market,” says Andrew Sjoquist, 

chi

ef executive officer, “but we recognized that it was the best way to 

respond to our customers’ desire to have a fixed price service 
delivery model.”  

In addition, cloud services helped enable the company to broaden its base of small and medium-sized businesses. 
“These customers want an enterprise quality solution but do not have the capital budgets to build those solutions 

for themselves. We embarked on a journey to build cloud services based on best-of-breed technology and deliver 

services from the desktop 

to the data center,” says Sjoquist. 

Good standardization of important data center elements such as infrastructure is vital to cloud success. ASE knew 

this early in its history and made the strategic decision to standardize on Cisco and NetApp for its six, soon to be 

10, 

data centers in Australia and the United States. “We decided that building stronger relationships with vendors 

like Cisco would result in greater efficiency and access to innovative technology to stay competitive,” says Sjoquist. 
“The ability to increase our customer base, touch so many vertical markets, and expand our global presence is 
because the infrastructure that we built is extremely nimble and agile.”