As we have been celebrating over the past weeks the Cisco UCS 5 year anniversary, here is another great example of an enthusiastic customer and partner .

Steria has been amongst the early adopters of Cisco UCS in 2009, as the IT organization was looking for innovative solutions.

5 years after the inception,  Eric Fradet , CTO on Infrastructure Management, reflected on the achievements and shared at Cisco Live Milan how transformative for his IT organization this "bold" move was .
Thanks to the UCS deployment, Steria has been able to develop quickly cloud services, starting with the IaaS and PaaS offers, and moving now into the desktop-as-a-service with an offer called Workplace on Command.
Amongst the qualities brought to the market by the UCS concept,  Eric Fradet was prompt to highlight the performances, the ease of deployment and the security .
And it was with great delight that a very satisfied customer  wished a warm "bon anniversaire" to UCS!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lVNo_RRy7LA

Actually the story of Steria is quite remarkable as the offer evolved recently to embrace the desktop with the deployement of Cisco Prime Service Catalog [ Spoiler alert : Stay tuned for more good news around Cisco Prime Service Catalog -Check Phillip Han's blog on this topic in the following days ]

Already one of the largest providers of IT-enabled business services in Europe, Steria is also becoming a global player with a growing presence in India, North  Africa, and South East Asia. With proven consulting skills, and expertise in IT and business process outsourcing, the company decided that the time was right to extend its offer to the cloud with offers targeting enterprise users .
A platform needed to be  selected that would allow Steria to maintain the high standards of service delivery,  performance, and management that enterprises expect. Security was particularly critical, because the cloud economic model is based on a shared IT infrastructure, while the ability to fulfill exacting service-level agreements was another imperative.

"Because Cisco UCS is a shared infrastructure platform, we no longer have to manage several siloed systems for different applications or customers," said Fradet. "This means we can spend less time on routine maintenance and focus much more on adding value to customers."

The results ? Fast provisioning, much lower operating cost, flexibility, and security. Overall the unified architecture has enabled Steria to make the cloud model a  success, from a financial as well as a technical perspective. It 's giving also Steria real freedom to  take appropriate business decisions in expanding the portfolio without having to redesign its  entire infrastructure.

As a matter of fact, the company realized that an opportunity might exist for a flexible system extending self-provisioning desktop services accessible from any device, using a cloud-based delivery model. "The desktop-as-a-service offer is not very mature in Europe," said  Eric Fradet, industrialization director for Service Line Infrastructure Management at Steria.

Steria relies on a wide range of Cisco? products for applications as diverse as IP telephony and IT security. The company had also adopted Cisco technology for the launch of its first cloud offering, an infrastructure-as-a-service product called Infrastructure On Command based on Cisco Unified Computing System? (UCS?) servers and Cisco Nexus? switches.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzmZKI4tpsI

To read more on this story, including the impressive results already achieved, follow these two links

- How Steria uses Cisco Prime Service Catalog Cloud Portal as foundation for innovative Workplace on Command service

-Introducing Steria Workplace on Command  (Website)