Systems integrator, Frontline Systems, has opened a new managed services business called Harbour MSP, gained through a partnership with massive Sydney data centre provider, Global Switch.
Frontline has been trialling customers for four months at Global Switch’s $165 million hosting facility in the inner city suburb of Pyrmont. From these premises Harbour MSP will offer a range of managed network and server-based services – starting at co-location hosting, through to managed firewall and applications, monitoring, load balancing and managed storage.
The company’s professional services staff will also offer customers assistance with designing architectures for IT infrastructure and can package this consulting with the data centre services, finance the leasing of equipment and charge on a recurring monthly or quarterly basis.
The MSP is the second in Australia to be certified by Sun Microsystems' SunTone program, that audits service providers around best practices using Sun Microsystems equipment. While Sun is a strong vendor partner for Frontline – Harbour MSP is both platform and carrier agnostic – offering solutions on Unix (Solaris), Linux and Wintel.
Frontline Systems managing director, Steve Murphy, said that Harbour MSP already had 12 customers, including a major law firm, telecommunications and e-commerce companies - none of which were previously customers of Frontline.
Murphy predicted that the new business would meet ambitious revenue targets and would be fully profitable within a year of operation.
“We have had the benefit of hindsight in watching other people fail at this,” he said. “This is not a case of build it and they will com – our partnership with Global Switch is a much more nimble approach. We will add to [the MSP business] we go.”
Murphy said he planned to expand Harbour MSP to Melbourne next year.