Mac Slingerlend, President & CEO Cloud computing is a major technology trend, that has permeated the market over the last few years. As cloud-computing options proliferate into organizations, it is increasingly becoming important for both the individual and the firm as a whole to make informed choices about use of cloud services—considering the benefits and risks associated with it. The truth is there is no easy path to the cloud, as security is a great concern for CIOs when moving their data to the cloud. “CIOs often cite worries over security as a reason for them to not leverage cloud infrastructure services,” states Mac Slingerlend President and CEO, Highstreet IT Solutions. CIOs and cloud leaders further wrestle with many other common challenges, including vendor lock-in, and shadow IT. To help enterprises gain clarity, Colorado-based Highstreet designs and delivers purpose-built cloud infrastructure services that are relevant to the industry.
Highstreet’s approach is customer-centric and is focused on delivering cloud solutions that best aligns customer’s applications with its business needs. As the cloud sets the stage for a new approach to IT, Highstreet’s service portfolio covers the entire IT operation stack, and can help manage delivery of application services whether hosted at organization’s facility, in Highstreet’s data centers, or on a public cloud. Essentially, the company offers a full range of managed services from hosting and infrastructure management to application operations and software support. “We offer full lifecycle consulting support services, including implementations, upgrades, optimization, IT strategy, and many more for PeopleSoft, Oracle E-Business Suite, and SAP applications,” says Slingerlend.
Focusing on the ERP Cloud services, Highstreet leverages core competencies in ERP application design and development, hosting and application managed services/support and IT service management based on the ITIL service framework. In addition, Highstreet offers Infrastructure as-a-Service (IaaS) where customers can utilize a pool of private virtual cloud resources, including a private VLAN, firewall context, vCPU, RAM and storage to self-manage utilizing VMware's vCloud Director or vCenter. “Clients may manage their IaaS resource pool, or use its fully managed services to deploy both virtual and dedicated servers, develop applications and run production-ready workloads,” affirms Jeff Conaty, VP/Cloud Solutions Division.
We offer full lifecycle consulting support services, including implementations, upgrades, optimization, IT strategy, and many more for PeopleSoft, Oracle E-Business Suite, and SAP applications
Alternatively, Highstreet’s private clouds offers power, efficiency, and features of a public cloud, with the security, control, and performance of a dedicated environment. “We have designed our platform with security controls and measures as well as regulatory compliance in mind,” assures Conaty. The company’s managed security offering is bundled with services which include private virtual data center, CISCO firewalls, independent 24/7 monitoring, amongst others. Customers can directly access the security monitors to validate the controls.
Highstreet’s delivery philosophy is to partner with its customers and be a member of their virtual team. The company is currently hosting a fully managed PeopleSoft system for one of its Higher Education customers. Highstreet is providing fully managed infrastructure from the hardware up through the network, compute, storage and firewalls, In addition, the company is delivering backup and restore, application performance monitoring, PeopleSoft Applications Operations which includes Web, Middleware and Database management. “We are also hosting and managing other applications, including imaging management, college book store, financial transaction processing and others,” added Slingerlend.
With 20+ years of experience in building successful, vertically-focused solutions, Highstreet is working towards delivering a new style of IT services for ERP and Cloud operations. The company is focused on staying ahead of its customers and competitors, in order to offer real value-added technical and functional support to help businesses and universities generate the greatest benefit from their cloud investments.
