The twelve-year partnership between South Africa’s largest privately-owned and managed ICT service provider, the Integr8 Group, and MTN Business, has resulted in the convergence of expertise to deliver a single point of contact and managed infrastructure that will benefit the enterprise and public sector market.
“The strategic partnership transcends the boundaries of a conventional ‘Telco-reseller’ arrangement and is considered a fully developed, mutually-beneficial partnership,” says Robert Sussman, joint CEO of Integr8. As a renowned leader within managed ICT services, Integr8 offers the market the benefit of MTN’s widespread connectivity footprint which allows for a combination of Integr8 and MTN Business solutions. This enables geographically dispersed sites to share vital business applications and provides access to the corporate Virtual Private Network (VPN).
Integr8 has enjoyed a decade-long presence within the MTN datacentre, ensuring the provision of services that include: multiple Fax2Mail platforms, Remote Data-backup synchronisation, Cloud Messaging and Unified Communication Platforms, Virtualised Infrastructure platforms in both a private and public cloud based offering, as well as an array of solutions for client cloud hosting.
“Our G8keeper platform is also hosted at MTN Business and provides the Integr8 Nerve Centre® and its clients with a meeting point for secure ticketing, alerting, monitoring and remote deployment. Our hosted messaging and collaboration platform provides on-demand access to all email and messaging services. Hardware and software infrastructure as a service can be provided within minutes from the provisioning platform that is dedicated to Integr8’s customers,” adds Sussman.
Sussman continues: “This offering delivers connections that are permanently and exclusively available for your use and highest level of Internet access. Traffic is carried over the MTN Business IP backbone network – one of the most rigorously engineered networks on the continent.”
There is also provision for redundancy and should there be a service disruption at any IP gateway, the meshed network architecture will enable traffic to be instantly re-routed within the VPN environment across multiple IP routes. The value of increased flexibility is another feature Integr8 is keen to expose its client base to. It reinforces the company’s dominant position in the mid-market corporate space, providing companies access previously unattainable services.
“This technology offers a range of bandwidth options and allows the user to optimise and aggregate bandwidth to ascertain the most appropriate spend and save costs,” adds Sussman. “In addition to flexibility and reliability, we have also focused on the scalability and sophisticated reporting and graphing that it offers.”
Additional benefits to the solution include round-the-clock support via Integr8’s technical services team, high capacity (full capacity of the access circuit) and the advantage of only paying for bandwidth and traffic required.
“MTN is focused on offering customers an enhanced experience on its network. Besides investing heavily on our network infrastructure to ensure that the experience is world-class, we also collaborate with experienced and knowledgeable partners to offer a complete converged solution to the market. Our partnership with Integr8 is testament to our commitment to offering real business solutions by providing a network that has the capacity and capability of availing future-proof and converged communications,” concludes Nomalanga Nkosi, GM: Enterprise Marketing at MTN SA.
