Software-defined data centers leveraging API-driven control and automation contributing to increasing customer usage and sales of hybrid colocation services
QTS Realty Trust, a leading provider of hybrid colocation and mega scale data center solutions, today announced increasing customer usage and business benefits associated with QTS’ Service Delivery Platform (SDP) engineered to manage and optimize hybrid colocation deployments.
In late 2017, QTS introduced the industry’s first software-defined orchestration platform that empowers customers to interact with their data and QTS services by providing real-time visibility, access, and dynamic control of critical metrics across hybrid IT environments from a single platform.
QTS is committed to the digitization of its end-to-end systems and processes to enable new ways for its customers and employees to interact with QTS’ platform and accelerate the deployment of new products and solutions.
Customers using new SDP applications such as Power Analytics, Asset Manager, and Online Ordering of QTS services are benefiting from greater control over their IT environments and costs, increased security, ease of compliance, and reduced risk.
SDP is powered by a data lake encompassing terabytes of numerical info that increases exponentially as new integrations are added. Collectively, the ability to digitize, analyze and automate significant amounts of data enables customers to innovate, make better business decisions and maximize their outsourced IT investment both within QTS and across multiple integrated service providers.
2018 Business and Revenue Highlights:
- During 2018, customer usage of SDP grew significantly with a 27% annual increase in the active user base. Over the course of 2018, SDP averaged nearly 16,000 active users across more than 1,100 QTS customers.
- SDP currently supports more than 157 customer-facing APIs compared to 40 in 2017 (400% increase).
- QTS made 872 enhancements and feature releases in 2018 compared to 246 in 2017.
- SDP and related automated workflows created new sales opportunities for nearly every QTS hybrid colocation salesperson during 2018.
- Customer usage of SDP applications like Power Analytics, that detect when a customer is approaching amperage thresholds and automatically notifies them, increased 440% and contributed to new power upgrades representing approximately $47,000/month of new monthly recurring revenue.
- Approximately 10% of all cross connect orders during 2018 were fully automated through SDP across 14 data centers.
- SDP automation has contributed to a 40% improvement in implementation from the time of order to the provisioning of new services.
- SDP now has 438 workflows and feature integrations with more than 15 best-in-class partners that customers work with on a wide range of hybrid orchestration functionality and services. These include leaders such as Salesforce.com, ServiceNow, Nutanix, PacketFabric, DivvyCloud, CloudCheckr, Wonderware, Andover, Kafka, Spark, and AWS Marketplace.
- SDP is enhancing the customer experience and contributing to QTS’ industry-leading Net Promoter Score of 75 which is nearly double that of the closest data center provider.
M3 Accounting is a software and services company that delivers actionable insight into financial performance for enterprise hospitality businesses including more than 5,000 hotels.
“As an analytics company, we clearly recognize the value of real-time visibility and dynamic control of critical metrics across our multi-data center colocation solution,” said Joel Michaels, Director, DevOps.
“QTS’ API-driven orchestration and Service Delivery Platform provides M3 with a cloud-like experience enabling demonstrable savings – Power Analytics in particular – that were not previously possible.”
Also read: QTS boosts its Service Delivery Platform with new features for colocation customers
“QTS’ Service Delivery Platform supports our mission to empower people and technology and has enabled our vision of delivering a truly software-defined data center platform to become a reality,” said Chad Williams, Chief Executive Officer of QTS.
“We believe SDP represents the future of IT infrastructure service delivery and we are committed to empowering our customers to make informed decisions based on data to maximize their investment within QTS data centers.”
In the coming months, QTS expects to announce a new software-defined connectivity solution, leveraging SDP to enable one-to-many automated options for network and cloud connectivity.
