comNuevo Engineering group - Finding the right technology to achieve their vision

comNuevo is a startup Australian IT and Engineering company based in Sydney. Through i-Sign, their digital signage solution, they assist commercial customers manage advertising material via the internet.

The Need

comNuevo started off with a small home-based server on a residential grade internet account and their public website hosted by a common US-based service. The company was preparing to launch a remotely manageable digital signage solution, i-Sign, to be marketed at the smallest local businesses right through to custom installations for multi-national chain-based organisations.

Through i-Sign, comNuevo aimed to provide a service with remote access, control and high security to its clients, and therefore needed a back end that matched that level of security. comNuevo’s managing director Marcus Adler realised that bringing this first product to market would require an ICT migration out of the home and into hosted data centre facilities, and the great challenge was that there were no other previous models to compare themselves to.

"You can get enterprise-based signage solutions but they are predicated on the fact that you have your own data centre, your own network and your own people to run the server that will drive your signage. That is the way it is today, there are no cloud-based solutions of this kind," Adler said, adding that a hosted service greatly reduced the financial risk for a new startup, particularly in the current climate.

To realise its vision, comNuevo enlisted Telarus’ Virtual Hosting service and implemented Telarus’ Managed Firewall to protect their servers and provide secure remote access for i-Sign owners to their displays at any time.

Jules Rumsey saw that comNuevo had an obvious need for a highly secure, robust and scalable solution, and tailored an offering to suit their requirements. Rumsey said the combination of virtual hosting on a platform that can scale over time, and leveraging secure remote access through a managed firewall which can also scale over time, was the best fit for comNuevo’s needs.

A Secure Virtual Hosting Service

Telarus’ Virtual Hosting service appealed to comNuevo as it removed the need for the startup to invest in its own hardware. Rather than incurring immediate fixed overheads, rackspace rent and other capex costs even before customer number one was up and running, a hosted virtual service allowed comNuevo to meet enterprise service level expectations, and pay only for what it needed without sacrificing scalability. "As we need more processing power and more space we just ring Telarus and ask them to dial up the services, so that provides fantastic scalability," Adler said.

comNuevo also chose to use Telarus’ Managed Firewall in addition to the hosted virtual server offering as a sure-fire way to deal with "extremely sensitive information". "We’ve got large corporations preparing ads online within our network and on our virtual server that have specific release dates" Adler said. "Should anybody get into that it could blow the lid on new ad campaigns and PR activities, so we needed a very secure infrastructure that can be accessed from anywhere".

 When selecting the best products to assist comNuevo achieve its vision, Jules Rumsey explained that they "went out and selected IBM blade centre as the underlying host platform, VMware as our virtualization engine, and we’re running an EMC Clariion SAN platform for disk, so all very well known and capable brands in their respective areas".

He also added that he would struggle to think of any client he has spoken to recently that hasn’t shown an interest in virtualisation within the data centre, particularly in light of the current economic climate.

"The ability to take a relatively low monthly recurring fee, comparative to what you would have to invest to build something yourself, and knowing that you’ve got a network operations centre and an engineering team available 24 x 7 to support you, gives people a lot of comfort and relieves pressure on the corporate wallet at the same time," he said.

According to Rumsey, who has been in the industry 15 years, the comNuevo job reinforced his position that tailoring a unique solution was paramount for servicing business clients who, in turn, need to service their own customers.

"The devil is in the details when it comes to selecting the most appropriate platform and in making sure you are comfortable that something will work as you expect it to, that it will scale appropriately, and you are going to have the fault tolerance that you need," he said.

Benefits

ComNuevo’s partnership with Telarus has been a success story from the beginning. When initially launching their i-Sign product, ComNuevo anticipated that the economy of scale of a hosted solution would attract mainly SMB customers. Adler was surprised however, when several casinos and large hotel chains expressed an interest in the i-Sign product. "Our specifications on the management side of the content impressed even companies that were looking at very big, custom installations, so systems recovery, uptime, 24 x 7 support and all these sorts of issues were immediately mission critical to our operation," he said.

While Adler admits that wirelessly sending data to an electronic display isn’t the ICT world’s idea of cutting edge, it is progressive in the world of digital signage, and he knew that the i-Sign’s success would be driven by its mobility and ease of installation. "For small businesses to get involved in electronic signage, whether it be a coffee shop displaying a menu or a casino, the fact that it’s 3G literally means you just plug it into the power point and away it goes," he said.

ComNuevo’s clients need access to sufficient bandwidth to push video and other media out to their signs, with a high level of service and no downtime. Not only did Telarus virtual hosting service provide the essential enterprise grade backbone, Adler said the cloud model meant comNuevo enjoyed a "massive reduction" in the financial risk of a new startup company – invaluable in today’s economic climate.

"It’s difficult to talk about how it changed comNuevo. It didn’t change us, it defined us," he said.