Customer Case Study: Momote

Tell me a bit more briefly about who you are and what you do.

Okay, I’m Simon Monk. I’m Technical Director of Momote Ltd and we develop mobile solutions for customers like Auto Glass and Bensons for Beds.

So what was the reason for you as a company working with Melbourne?

We chose Melbourne because we felt that they had a similar sort of ethos to our own. We’re a young technology company and we liked their approach.

Were you happy or unhappy with service that you got from another company?

We were. We had some problems with previous companies. In particular, one of our other hosting partners had their data centre next to a river, which wasn’t the ideal situation. So we actually lost about a week’s work of service.

After you decided that you were going to change your hosting, did you look around at other companies, and what were the sort of factors that you brought to bear?

We did look at other companies and we found that at one end of the spectrum there were very high priced companies who were perhaps more sales oriented than Melbourne and we found that really Melbourne offered us a good compromise between professionalism and a local personal service.

Was cost a factor in this or are there other factors with you as – on the IT side, was cost not an overriding factor?

Cost was important because we do have to pass on most of our hosting costs to our customers, so again it’s much easier to do or there’s some margin in it for us if we can keep the costs relatively low, so that was important to us.

So exactly tell me what Melbourne does for you.

Melbourne hosts a number of servers for us that we have set up in a virtual machine environment and most of these servers are for customers that we resell on, but we also use them for our internal servers.

So since you started working with Melbourne, have you increased the amount of products and services you buy from them or has it remained reasonably the same?

The services that we buy from Melbourne have increased over the years really. We started off I think just with one server, pretty much, to try out the service and see how things worked, and we gradually increased now to I think we have three dedicated servers, fairly beefy, all running virtual machines for our customers.

So that’s got to be good for Melbourne. What do you think makes them different?

I think what makes them different is it’s a personal approach that’s very much based around technology, so it’s not … It isn’t a sort of sales driven organisation. They very much make the sale a technical sale to people who want a solution to their hosting.

So do the sales team actually phone you up and pester you and try to sell you raffle tickets?

No, they don’t. They never phone up and pester. It’s delightful from that point of view.

But if you phoned them, how does it work?

If we phone them we find that we get a very good response. We have a sort of named person who we try and speak to most of the time and it just works very well. They’re always very responsive. We never have difficulty in getting in touch with people. And when you ring up, you sort of feel that they actually know who you are…even if they didn’t have a CRM system in front of them, which is a nice touch.

One of the things that Melbourne say that makes them different is they have their own data centres. They don’t just rent a cage in somebody else’s. Do you think that’s an important factor in dealing with Melbourne?

I think it’s very important that Melbourne have their own data centre because if they don’t and they are just essentially renting space from somebody else then it’s outside of their control and they’re effectively just a reseller organisation. So actually being able to look round the data centre and see the racks, and see how everything’s organised, you really get the impression that they’ve thought of everything and everything is under their control.

Also, they use branded servers. You see a lot of Dell servers in the datacentres. Is that important to you, the robustness of the actual kit?

The robustness of the kit is very important to us and I think the issue of it being branded or not is less so, only in so much as our customers like to hear that branded kit is being used sometimes. So it just makes it easier to sell it on.

Fine, so that’s an aspect that even I hadn’t thought of that you as a reseller find it easier.

Yes.

What about network speeds? What about up times? What about outages? Have you had any issues with any of those technical things?

No. As far as outages go, we’ve had no problems at all. We’ve had very good communications to the extent that Phil, who’s our systems manager will receive emails saying there’s a vague possibility that something might go slightly wrong two weeks on Tuesday while they’re doing some out-of-hours maintenance work. So it just feels like you’re kept in the loop, so you understand if any issues are going to crop up that you’re prepared for them.

And what about the data speeds and things like that, have there ever been any issues?

No. It’s a very well connected data centre and the performance has been absolutely fine.

One issue that some people are getting quite concerned about is green hosting, and I noticed that you said you’re using virtual servers. Can you expand a bit more about that?

Sure. Green hosting is very important and we’ve found that we’ve been able to get rid of a number of dusty old servers that have been lurking around the office for years by moving them into a virtual machine environment and then having them hosted by Melbourne. So even apart from the green effects of that, we’ve also reduced our electricity costs fairly significantly in the office.

So have you ever had any problems with Melbourne and, if so, how have they been resolved?

We’ve never had any problems with Melbourne. There really is nothing to report on that.

So what would you say to other companies, perhaps people in your situation, certainly people who perhaps resell, what would you say to other companies who were looking for server companies?

I’d say to other companies that if they’re looking for a good value but professional and personal service that they should look at Melbourne very carefully.