Centroid
The Cloud Workload Migration and Management Experts

A workload can be regarded as the totality of the requests—made by users, applications, databases or other technologies in an enterprise ecosystem, and involves a constant back and forth of data and queries that “load” IT systems and their resources. In today’s enterprise environments, customers are running workloads on different ecosystems that are scattered both on-premise and on-cloud, which often leads to complications in operations. While enterprise giants like Oracle offer powerful cloud services for workload management, the lack of knowing the workloads in your environment, shortage of cloud capabilities, and resources to migrate often hinders customers from being successful in the cloud. This is where a well-orchestrated workload migration can do wonders.

However, most of the solution providers have different perspectives when it comes to workload migration: some are focused on applications, others on technologies, and the rest on hardware. For customers who look to modernize, transform, and grow their business, these are trying times that spell the need for a single, integrated service provider that can help them navigate the entangled prospects of workload migration.

Enter Centroid.

With its innovative approach to workload migration and over two decades of application and technology expertise, Centroid addresses client needs with their unique, full-circle solutions. Realizing that organizations need knowledge of all the aspects of current workload stance, its migration, and management, Centroid—unlike most service providers in the market—focuses on the entire gamut, and not just specific technical/functional components. Centroid’s business and technology specialists work closely with clients and help them to migrate and manage their enterprise workloads while they grow their business.

Legacy and Innovation

With over two decades of relationship with Oracle as a platinum partner, Centroid’s specialists and consultants are certified on the latest technology that enables application modernization, as well as Oracle solutions. Centroid is also part of the highly regarded Oracle Cloud Select program, delivering the highest caliber solutions to its customers. Both customers and Oracle frequently rate Centroid as a leading Oracle service partner, and it is placed in the highest positions of service performance. Additionally, as one of a few certified national level MSP Partners to Oracle, the company has gone through rigorous 3rd party audits, to be designated as fully certified.

Diagnostic Solutions for Enterprise Workload Management

Centroid serves midmarket and enterprise-level companies, a majority of whom are in the manufacturing or distribution sectors, with others in banking, finance, and entertainment. Irrespective of the industry vertical, Centroid has identified that the key workload management challenges for their clients come from the pervasiveness of the industry’s cloud-first approach. Many clients face heavy pressure to undergo cloud migration, and some do not necessarily know what that means and require external expertise.

“We look at customers' workloads and help them figure out which workload runs best where, both from a performance standpoint, and a total cost of ownership perspective. Most customers have multiple cloud providers, and they need help migrating, integrating, and managing those workloads across the different cloud providers so that their operations are running smoothly,” mentions Jim Brull, Managing Partner at Centroid. Also, with substantial assets spread over a number of different data centers, there is an imperative to reduce operating expenses. The cost to move to the cloud, and re-architect applications, technology, and infrastructure is a major pain point at the end of the day. Also, as clients try to do more with their business by migrating to the cloud, they will not have a lot of time to embrace newer technologies and capabilities to go to market. Centroid helps customers overcome these challenges and achieve their objectives with a unique 3-step workload migration methodology:

Centroid’s preliminary task involves comprehensively understanding the workloads present in a client’s environment, creating and executing a comprehensive plan to move them to the cloud, and providing ongoing support through managed services once they get there

Step 1: Cloud Advisor

Centroid’s preliminary task involves comprehensively understanding the workloads present in a client’s environment to determine which ones are mission-critical and which are not. However, this requires that the clients accurately capture workload specifics around the applications, technology, hardware, operating systems and what versions; all of which is a tedious task if performed manually. Centroid has tools that quickly discover and gather the inventory of all the components of these workloads, which ultimately makes customers well informed about all the resources they have, the versions, and technology. This helps clients figure out their position in the cloud journey. “We advise all clients to start with us as the Cloud Advisor. You need to have a holistic picture of an environment to help organizations move those workloads to the right cloud provider and to which type of cloud service,” adds Brull.

Step 2: Cloud Migrator

By taking the output from the Cloud Advisor step and mapping where those workloads fit, either into SaaS, PaaS, and/or IaaS, Centroid helps clients initiate the workload migration. Some applications might make sense to be left behind and re-deployed to SaaS. On the other hand, the IaaS model works best for those workloads that only needs to be “lifted and shifted.” Customers who take that “lift and shift” approach get a 35 percent savings immediately. With the lift and shift approach, Centroid takes specific workloads and move them into the cloud automatically. Some workloads also can provide additional business value by being modernized along the way into PaaS. PaaS allows for more automation and easier management of the workloads once migrated.

Additionally, the Centroid Cloud Migrator works at unprecedented speed – moving workloads to the cloud in hours instead of days.

Step 3: Cloud Manager

Ultimately, Centroid wants to help organizations get the most out of their cloud environments. As such, they extend their capabilities and expertise to manage any cloud providers, such as Oracle, Amazon, Google, and IBM. Because of Centroid’s cloud, integration, networking, security, application, middleware, and database capabilities, the service provider can manage client resources and operations more efficiently, which will, in turn, help the client maximize their return on investments. Centroid’s managed service capabilities help their clients offload the burden of technology management to focus on their core competencies.

Leading Through Example—A Better Solution Every Time

Through their multifaceted industry capabilities, which extend across different sectors, Centroid has helped many clients overcome their cloud adoption challenges. One case in point is a manufacturer that was assigned a directive by management to grow and double the company revenue in three years and change their revenue model to subscription based while bringing in new capabilities.

The challenge was that IT was a big part of all these objectives. The CIO was also asked by the board to end their reliance on data centers. The task required him to free up his resources to focus on the goal at hand, while simultaneously helping grow the business and change the revenue model.

Centroid came in and proposed a starting point for Cloud Advisor, Migrator, and Manager. The company looked at the client’s workloads running in the data centers, collected every detail about them, analyzed it, and figured out where they will fit in this cloud journey. Centroid started with a small part of their project, and following its success, moved on to larger workloads. The service provider was able to shut down their reliance on data center within six months while performing some massive upgrades along the cloud migration journey. Those upgrades allowed the company to change its revenue model, from selling at once to being subscription-based. Centroid then helped the company move many other workloads from other data centers into Oracle cloud and currently, the company is tasked with finalizing the client’s last set of workloads, allowing them to focus on their actual business initiatives.

"We look at customers' workloads and help them figure out which workload runs best where, both from a performance standpoint, and a total cost of ownership perspective"

With such depth expertise in managing and migrating Oracle workloads, applications, and tech, Centroid can ensure that workloads can run anywhere—on any hardware or cloud provider. Leveraging their customers’ feedback, the company is constantly improving its capabilities and offerings to help those who need their workloads to run on Oracle, Amazon, Google Public Cloud, Azure, or even IBM SoftLayer. As a result, Centroid’s customer base and industry footprint are on a rapid expansion phase. Over the next 12-18 months, Centroid plans to dig deeper into industry trends and practices, to make sure that they have the capabilities and the offerings that the market is asking for. “Our offerings are going to keep pushing that way because that is what customers want. They need someone with the capabilities to architect, move, and manage their workloads in different cloud ecosystems,” concludes Brull.