In a time of economic challenge for many organizations, people often ask me for the recipe for the ‘secret sauce’ of Leaseweb’s great success as a provider of hosting services. How do we manage to continue to rapidly grow our hosting business?
R&D at Leaseweb
At Leaseweb, we embrace the strategy of focusing on our clients’ requirements to ensure superior customer outcomes. We do business with very large bandwidth consumers, such as enterprise, media companies, and content delivery networks (CDN); as well as resellers, including system integrators, web designers and application developers. Leaseweb also serves many other customers who simply want to have the best hosting experience possible, with a host which meets and exceeds their expectations with world class service and network quality, combined with many cost effective solutions available to meet their needs.
Leaseweb began its focus on meeting the hosting needs of its clients from our inception in 1997. Leaseweb remains strongly committed to providing great hosting services with cutting edge technology and excellent customer support. Leaseweb hosting solutions allow our clients, located throughout the world, to achieve outstanding hosting results every day.
Leaseweb also embraces efficiency in our business processes, product and service offerings. We invest heavily in research and development, with our technically advanced, highly skilled R&D team, highly focused on meeting our customers’ requirements. For example, we have developed tools to allow our clients easy and effective control of their Leaseweb hosting services.
Leaseweb is committed to making our datacenters more environmentally friendly and energy efficient. Recently, our R&D-team developed a new cooling solution for our clients – Ultra Green Hosting, with an extremely energy friendly outcome – a win-win proposition for the environment, with increased energy efficiency — and our customers, allowing them the opportunity for more economical hosting solutions.
Leaseweb hosting solutions help clients achieve success – the AFAS Story
An example of Leaseweb, working with its customers, to achieve great results, is our client, AFAS. AFAS, founded in 1996, currently has more than 300 employees. It is a very successful company, well-known in the Netherlands for its Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software. ERP software integrates all facets of the business process including: planning, manufacturing, sales, and marketing. ERP replaces the many standalone management systems used by different company departments, with a single unified ERP program, divided into software linked modules. ERP empowers a company’s employees, by allowing them a 360° view of company processes, for example, order fulfillment. In 2009, AFAS started delivering web based applications – Software as a Service (SaaS), utilizing the Leaseweb VMware hosting solution, under the name: AFAS Online (www.afasonline.nl).
“Focus and Efficiency are the keys to developing great software products to fulfil AFAS customer needs”, state Piet Mars and Ton van der Veldt, the founders of AFAS, when asked the secret of the remarkable success of their company. This strategy has definitely paid off handsomely for AFAS. Last year, AFAS grew its revenues by 20 percent to almost 44 million Euros with net profits of 10,5 million Euros. ERP by SaaS, hosted on the Leaseweb VMware platform, played a notable part in AFAS’ rapid revenue growth last year.
Leaseweb VMware Solution Provides AFAS with a technologically advanced platform for SaaS hosting
We offer the Leaseweb VMware solution for customers requiring virtualization, management, resource optimization, application availability and operational automation capabilities in a fully integrated offering. VMware virtualizes the entire IT infrastructure, including servers, storage and networks. Leaseweb VMware combines these resources into a simple and uniform set of computing resources in the virtual environment. With a Leaseweb VMware platform, clients using our VMware solution can manage their resources as a shared utility. Client can dynamically provision these resources efficiently to different business units and projects, without worrying about the underlying hardware differences and limitations.
By utilizing Leaseweb hosting solutions, AFAS continues to achieve great cost efficiencies and superior performance, compared with hosting its applications in-house. Among the many benefits AFAS SaaS receives by hosting on the Leaseweb VMware platform include: a secure hosting solution; always available 24/7 technical support; and location in the state-of-the-art green, carbon neutral datacenter, EvoSwitch. Leaseweb is one of the very few hosts capable of delivering a comprehensive VMware infrastructure hosting layer solution to meet customer requirements.
By now it should be clear that the ‘secret sauce’ we used for AFAS to provide a successful hosting outcome is the same superior quality we provide to all Leaseweb customers. Focusing on our customer needs and efficiently meeting their requirements allows Leaseweb clients to achieve superior hosting outcomes, no matter whether clients are large or small, or, indeed, whatever their hosting requirements may be. We welcome your inquires, for new or enhanced services now or in the future. Contact us at sales@leaseweb.com for more details on how Leaseweb can help you with all your data hosting requirements.