Phoenix provides a place to learn

Unlike large enterprises, mid-market firms don’t necessarily have the financial resources or technical expertise to respond rapidly to dynamic technology changes. They are often forced to build on top of legacy IT systems that do not have the power or flexibility to keep pace with the modern day requirements of an ever-changing user, customer and competitor landscape.

In response to this situation, hosting, cloud and managed IT services provider, Phoenix, is to open a brand new Technology Innovation Centre, at its site in Birmingham. The centre will provide organisations with a flexible environment to explore new technologies and solutions, allowing them to understand the impact of change to their IT infrastructure and ultimately their business.

Scheduled to open in May 2014, the new centre is designed to address the challenges faced by mid-market organisations, when it comes to managing their IT infrastructure, as well as providing an environment for decision-makers and C-level execs to understand the impact and benefits that potential technologies can have on their organisation.

Created with support from industry practitioners and leading IT vendors including Asigra, Citrix, HP, NetApp and Microsoft, the Centre will enable organisations across the mid-market to meet with IT, business continuity and resiliency experts, to see how these technologies can be applied to real-life scenarios using replicas of their own servers, applications and data.

The centre enables a range of voice and data technologies including cloud, virtualisation, and mobility services, to be investigated and tested in order for organisations to understand how these can be implemented into their existing infrastructure. Visitors will have access to a range of customer experiences, design facilities and live demonstrations that ultimately allow them to plan and build their future infrastructure.

Systems and applications areas available for examination  will include server, storage area network and communication equipment, BYOD impact testing, network services, hosting and cloud services infrastructure monitoring & management, recovery proof of concept, backup and archiving, and a resiliency solutions design centre.

Mike Osborne, managing director of Business Continuity services at Phoenix, explains that the new centre aims to provide an outlet which addresses the concerns and complexities experienced by mid-market firms that are looking to cut through the risk and confusion when it comes to transforming their IT infrastructure.

“Managing a diverse IT infrastructure across multiple sites or disparate systems each with different data availability requirements is a challenging process and can put a huge strain on an organisation, regardless of size,” he said. “For SMEs and mid-level firms the impact of this strain is often compounded by financial restrictions – they don’t have the luxury of spending vast amounts of money on solutions which may be outdated or underperforming in a years’ time, and therefore it’s imperative they make the right choices first time when it comes to investing in their IT infrastructure.

“The purpose of our new Technology Innovation Centre is to provide a testing ground to find the best fit for the latest trends, approaches and solutions to develop, maintain and protect, an organisation’s IT estate.”

Visitors will be able to design their own solutions, as well as planning and testing them. So they can understand the full impact of change and how to achieve assured performance, efficiency and resilience for their business operations and IT infrastructure.

The Centre is expected to provide an outlet where senior decision makers can learn and understand how new technologies fit their business without risk to their production infrastructure.

More information on the new Centre can be found here.