Use CaseEmpowering IT-Provider

With a high automation level in monitoring and reporting of daily backup and recovery scenarios, customers in the DACH region benefit significantly from the managed service Empalis Service Plus today. Learn how the consolidated partnership between Predatar and Empalis has led to the development of a modern managed service infrastructure architecture that also enables IT providers to reach entirely new levels.

Looking back 

Five years after starting a partnership, two friendly partners, Predatar and Empalis, are reflecting on the benefits. Originally, Empalis was focused on consulting. When a project ended, finding new opportunities for revenue in economically unstable times could be difficult. That’s why Empalis decided to introduce a managed service offering. The ambition was to leverage their expertise to drive the business in a new direction and open up new sources of consistent, reliable revenue.

Looking back, this new strategy has clearly paid off. Today, Empalis can boast a 30 percent growth in turnover. The partnership with Predatar has given Empalis a new direction and opened up new revenue streams, making the day-to-day business and the future of Empalis much more exciting.

Achievements at a glance

• Empalis has successfully repositioned themselves in the market as a managed service provider with Empalis Service Plus - with new cloud capabilities.

• As a further positive side effect of development, customers also commissioned Empalis in order to sell storage and backup appliances

• Design, implementation, and sale of own appliances has opened-up further new revenue streams.

• Empalis reached increased sales to customers through up-selling and cross-selling.

• Empalis has effectively introduced remote working.

Introducing Empalis

Since 1989, Stuttgart-based Empalis Consulting has been bringing deep expertise in  IT infrastructure to businesses across Germany and beyond. The business has expanded its capabilities in the IBM Spectrum suite beyond IBM Spectrum Protect (formerly IBM Tivoli Storage Manager) and now provides a wide variety of consulting services in project management, distributed systems, system automation,  middleware and collaboration, along with  IT security and training. The 40-plus staff use their expert knowledge and experience to add significant value to a broad range of clients in pharmaceuticals, finance, insurance and IT provision.

Introducing Predatar

"Much more than a business partner, Empalis has rapidly become a trusted collaborator. We build tools for the most demanding storage and backup professionals in the world and there is no team more demanding than the experts at Empalis. They work to the highest standards and help us to achieve excellence too.", Alistair Mackenzie considers.

Just like Empalis, Predatar has been on a journey. Starting out as an IBM storage reseller, the business has evolved and today provides a revolutionary backup and recovery platform for IBM Spectrum Protect and Spectrum Protect Plus users. Their purpose has always been to ensure that their customers can recover quickly and effectively from any data loss event; and today the Predatar platform makes it easy - with backup and recovery analytics, reporting and automations, that help to manage many customer accounts more effectively by providing visibility across multiple data estates. In addition, Predatar automates many of the time consuming and repetitive tasks associated with backup and recovery – allowing to focus IT Provides on the really complicated tasks where they add most value for their customers.

Innovative Managed Service Model for IT-Provider

The Challenge

As cloud adoption increased, Empalis realised the diverse and changing needs of its customers and recognized the need to adopt new practices to meet them. 

Alina takes a look back:"Since cloud adoption increased more than five years ago, we realised, we must shift to a managed services model in order to meet changing customer requirements. We chose Predatar as a key part of the solution. Our success shows that we are on the right track: Predatar’s transformative technology opens up many new business opportunities in backup-as-a-service, disaster recovery-as-a-service and replication-as-a-service." 

The Solution

Empalis developed a new business model in partnership with Predatar – launching a suite of special tiered managed services packages, known as  Empalis Service Plus. The key to do this was the partnership with Predatar’s uniquely sophisticated, user-friendly and of highly scalable capabilities.

As well as moving to a managed services model, Empalis has also transitioned to more flexible ways of working for the team. The use of Predatar as the management layer for backup and recovery has been a key factor in enabling remote working for Empalis consultants.

Why this successful partnership is to the benefit of IT providers

Empalis’ development of tiered packages will place it in the vanguard of companies capable of responding to  increasing cloud adoption, enabling it to on-board clients needing managed services swiftly. “Our own digital transformation from a pure consulting business to one that provides manage services has had a tremendous positive impact for our company, making our revenue more stable and more reliable." states Alina Mot. "We now have less risk in times of economic crisis (including the current pandemic). Today we we have a strong balance of 50-50 percent revenue from consulting and services.”

As a further benefit for IT-Provider on top , Predatar offers multi-tenant, pay-per-use billing on IBM software. It allows Empalis, and thus also the IT providers, to be more flexible and to tailor costs and billing to their own customers.

This, and the fact that Predatar has developed a global backup and recovery management  platform, were critical aspects that Empalis needed for its customers. Since Empalis customers are mostly IT providers offering data protection services themselves – either to internal departments globally or to their customers worldwide –  there was a need to be able to act and manage on a global level. Predatar supports that aspect too. Moreover, Empalis customers can now benefit from managed services, hardware and software sales and consulting from a single source.  

The idea has been a success: Since started the partnership with Predatar in 2017, Empalis has now moved beyond managed service, exploring new ways and ideas to offer greater value to customers through additional products and services.

Predatar has seen huge benefits too. Not least, from access to the deep experience of the Empalis technical team. Furthermore, Empalis also helped to position Predatar in the German market and reach a German-speaking audience across the DACH region.

By investing in the new partnership, Empalis and Predatar were able to create a win-win situation for IT Providers on the market. Predatar has strengthened its position in Europe with all features of Predatar available via Empalis Service packages, that fit individually for several combinations of need. Empalis Managed Service includes customer support by a German-speaking team based on individual and personal service and a technical approach, enabling Empalis to deliver faster solutions and better results. 

"Empalis has proven to be an excellent technical partner: Empalis has always been the first to test and give critical feedback on our new features that we are currently implementing for the German cloud in terms of Recovery Orchestration and Cyber Resiliency. So Empalis had a strong influence on our development.", states Steve Miller, CTO of Predatar. Alina Mot agrees: