“CloudFirst and Shield Advanced Solutions have partnered in many instances to benefit clients.”
Ocean States Job Lots is a northeastern American chain of discount closeout retailers, founded in Rhode Island in 1977. They are a long-time client of CloudFirst and until recently were running Mimix for their High Availability solution. OSJL had independently bought and installed Mimix just over a year ago. They were, however shocked when it came to maintenance renewal. They saw a hefty price increase. Their maintenance was hit two-fold. First an increase due to changes with Precisely, who now charge for both systems – the target system with CloudFirst and the onprem OSJL host system. They were further hit with another increase, having changed up to an IBM Power 10. These two factors brought the overall cost for annual maintenance renewal to a prohibitive high. Unfortunately OSJL found there was no negotiation or flexibility with Precisely, to progress out of the situation.
CloudFirst was interested to see their client resolve the issue. Several CloudFirst clients were using Shield’s High Availability solution – Shield’s HA4i, and offered this as an alternative. Reviewing the contract with Replication, Licencing and Management, OSJL found the complete package more affordable than the Mimix maintenance.
OSJL’s CIO Hisham Aharon says, “We were pleasantly surprised at what HA4i can do, and pleased with its capabilities. This was a great recommendation from CloudFirst, and a path forward for us.”
Says Chris Hird, Shield Advanced Solutions Director, “Shield and CloudFirst partner in many situations, High Availability, Monitoring and Messaging. We were pleased to offer an alternative for their client and help them out of a difficult situation. Our business philosophy is to listen to our clients and we have a reputation of helping where we can.”
CloudFirst’s Chuck Paolillo, “It is always satisfying to see a good outcome, such as this. In business today, one has to try to be reasonable and flexible working with the client to find a satisfactory resolution.
CloudFirst provides hosting, backup, disaster recovery, high availability, security, and managed services – https://www.cloudfirst.host/
For more information on Shield’s High Availability and Monitoring solutions visit – Shield Products