The ease of use and flexibility of the Magentrix platform made it straightforward to setup and customize our primary and custom portals.
Jim Janke, Director of Business Process, Artisan Infrastructure
Artisan Infrastructure is a wholesale Infrastructure-as-a Service (IaaS) provider with headquarters in Austin, Texas. Artisan Infrastructure’s channel partners eliminate the capital expenditure of building and maintaining best-of-breed, geographically redundant data centers and take advantage of a pay-as-you-grow custom cloud price model. Partners include national and international cloud solutions providers, large IT services distributors, ISV’s, VoIP providers, and value added resellers.
Business Challenge
Artisan Infrastructure is a rapidly growing IaaS provider with a need for effective partner communications. While a basic partner portal was in place the company was rapidly outgrowing the portal’s capabilities. The initial needs included a mobile optimized self-service portal for channel partners along with several custom portals for distribution partners. Limited IT resources were available for the project so Operations took the lead. The existing portal was adequate but customizations were costly and took as long as 2 weeks turnaround time. The company needed a solution that could be managed by Business Operations and that could rapidly develop new features to respond to partner’s needs.
Requirements
Artisan Infrastructure required a solution that was fully integrated with Salesforce.com to maintain existing business processes. Major goals for the initial implementation included the ability to create and share documents and resources from disparate systems with partners and without the need for custom coding. The portals needed to provide technical information on a complex set of products including standard multi-tenant resources, bare metal clouds and hybrid cloud configurations. Jim Janke, Salesforce Administrator and Director of Business Process at Artisan Infrastructure said, “We just needed to get the right information to the right people at the right time”.
In addition to providing users with self-service access to product information, Artisan Infrastructure also needed to customize the look and feel of the portals. Longer term, they wanted partners to use the portals to manage support cases, all account resources, partner contacts, communications, and all other items related to their IaaS resources. Support for mobile devices, SSO and API integration to external systems completed the wish list.
The Magentrix Solution
After researching the available options Artisan Infrastructure selected the Magentrix platform for their partner portals. As anticipated the Business Operations team completed the initial implementation and deployment without any help from IT. According to Mr. Janke, “The ease of use and flexibility of the Magentrix platform made it straightforward to setup and customize the portals as needed. Even when a bit of coding was required, we had assistance from the Magentrix team and were able to turn things around in a day. Magentrix Professional Services are awesome!”
The entire company now sees the potential of Magentrix and its flexibility. Before choosing Magentrix, the things we wanted to do with our portals seemed far off in the future. Now we’re excited that we can get them done in a few months.
Jim Janke, Director of Business Process, Artisan Infrastructure