Customer Success Story
The Game Changer for TLine: Virtuozzo Hybrid Infrastructure
Tline accelerates its Anything-as-a-Service vision, cuts infrastructure costs 300%, increases margin 30%
From its roots as a hardware reseller, to becoming a full cloud service provider and the first digital solutions broker in Latin America, TLine makes digital transformation easy for its SME and MSP customers.
TLine chose Virtuozzo Hybrid Infrastructure to accelerate its Anything-as-a-Service vision, and make a huge range of cloud services fast, easy and cost-effective for companies in the U.S. and across Latin America.
Carlos Pino,
President & CEO, TLine
“Simplicity is a key differentiator for Virtuozzo. While there are other cloud solutions that claim to be easy-to-use, none offer that same level of simplicity. Virtuozzo Hybrid Infrastructure is easy to manage, easy to deploy, flexible and affordable.”
A transformational journey
TLine initially launched in 2002 as a specialized data storage technology distributor and integrator with a primary focus on Latin America, including major operations centers in Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Mexico.
In 2019, TLine president and CEO, Carlos Pino, recognized the shift in the industry, where they were facing a new set of challenges including the obsolescence of hardware, and increasing pressure to reduce IT costs, all while maintaining competitive first mover advantage.
Those challenges, coupled with the acceleration of digital transformation, led them to shift their business focus from a VAR (Value Added Reseller) to a cloud aggregator.
For TLine, digital transformation does not mean dramatic changes in technology. Digital transformation is consuming the technology that we know today in a different way.
With more than 110 employees across Mexico, Argentina, Chile, Brazil and the US, TLine – both a cloud and managed service provider – helps their customers migrate to the cloud.
Reinventing the Business
TLine president and CEO Carlos Pino recognized it was time to reinvent the business by capitalizing on growing trends to meet annual recurring revenue goals. The vision: to shift from being a traditional value-added reseller to becoming the go-to supplier and consultant for customers seeking to leverage digital solutions.
First came the successful introduction of managed services, as customers sought to augment or offload internal IT support. Then came the idea of adding public and private cloud services—specifically IaaS, PaaS, and MaaS solutions —to broaden TLine’s value proposition still more. TLine intended to establish these services via a unified Cloud Marketplace supporting customers of any size in Latin America as well as the U.S.
The opportunity was there, with the global cloud infrastructure services market valued at nearly $150 billion and 30 percent of that market being attributed to alternative platforms. Given Virtuozzo is purpose-built to support hybrid cloud environments, TLine partnered with the virtualization and hyperconverged software solutions leader in 2019 and never looked back.
Creating new revenue streams from cloud
Evolving into a Cloud Service Provider (CSP) required TLine to host a cloud infrastructure. The infrastructure would have to support any Cloud environment with rich functionality that enabled multi-tenancy; delivery of several anything as a Service (XaaS) solutions; consumption-based pay-as-you-go (PAYG) models; no vendor-lock; and more.
In addition, with TLine shifting from a transactional, hardware reseller to a CSP, it can create new revenue streams because it can monetize more than Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) or Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). TLine can deploy Virtuozzo on a set of hardware and sell their customers data Protection-as-a-service (DPaaS), disaster recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS), virtual desktop infrastructure-as-a-service (VDIaaS), hardware-as-a-service, migration-as-a-service, etc.
“To get trained and certified on a hyperscaler solution takes at least 3 months. With Virtuozzo, I can teach a customer in 3 hours.”
— Carlos Pino
For cloud service providers who want to create a public cloud, there are four options:
Use a hyperscaler
Use a third-party solution that could be very costly
Build it yourself using OpenStack
Or…have a company such as Virtuozzo provide a public cloud solution out of the box
TLine first considered building its own with OpenStack, the free open standard cloud computing platform. However, after scoping the project, it was determined to be too time consuming and too costly given the required dedicated engineering resources.
Outside of in-house development, deploying hyperscaler or captive OEM solutions were the most common alternatives for launching clouds. These options are expensive and complex…packed with unpredictable costs and dense service portfolios…as they were designed for the enterprise first, not small-to medium-sized businesses. Further, they lacked elasticity to easily scale up or down. As a result, 67 percent of organizations using hyperscalers were reportedly looking for alternatives to supplement them.
The game changer: Virtuozzo Hybrid Infrastructure
Designed with the service provider in mind, Virtuozzo Hybrid Infrastructure proved to be a game changer for TLine. The production-ready OpenStack cloud solution offered public, private, virtual private, and hybrid cloud provisioning as well as storage as a service. Further, it directly addressed all of TLine’s critical requirements for backend and customer-facing management.
Reducing costs By 300%
TLine was able to install and integrate Virtuozzo Hybrid Infrastructure into its easy-to-use, easy-to-manage cloud marketplace in only one week, and, in turn, accelerates time-to-market for their end-users from months to hours. TLine has since emerged as the first broker of digital solutions in the LatAm region.
Virtuozzo Hybrid Infrastructure’s flexible licensing model with hybrid capabilities makes it simple to on-board and support customers. As a result, TLine has to date increased its profit margins by 30 percent, while lowering cloud infrastructure costs by 300%.
Benefits for TLine customers
Today, customers select and immediately deploy cloud solutions through a simple, self-service portal. They purchase only the virtual products they need, pay only for what they use, and can scale up or down via a few clicks; enabling them to keep overhead costs down. TLine’s customer experience is, according to Pino, effortless. TLine’s and Virtuozzo’s relationship is a collaborative partnership that continues to drive innovation for both businesses.
Since TLine’s initial launch of its Cloud Marketplace, the companies have worked together to identify and build in new features and functionality that benefit all Cloud Service Providers leveraging Virtuozzo Hybrid Infrastructure.
