News Release                            

Origina and Microsoft Join Forces to Simplify and Reduce Cost of Virtualisation in Irish Enterprise Market

• New alliance will offer virtualised, private cloud solutions to enterprise organisations
• Cost of virtualised solution from Origina and Microsoft is available at up to 40% less than rival offerings

Dublin, Ireland, 01 December 2010

Origina, a leading Irish IT services company, today announced a new partnership with Microsoft in the Irish market to offer lower cost and simplified virtualisation solutions to enterprise organisations.  Through the integration of Origina’s private cloud infrastructure and Microsoft’s Hyper-V virtual servers, the new solution will be available at significantly lower cost than comparable rival offerings - up to 40% in some cases. Origina and Microsoft see significant opportunities to grow revenues for server virtualisation in the Irish enterprise space.  This is being fuelled by organisations looking to consolidate their existing storage and server requirements, reduce costs, lower carbon emissions and improve disaster recovery times.

With Origina’s existing knowledge and footprint in the Irish enterprise market, Microsoft expects Hyper-V to gain further market share.  Hyper-V has already gained almost 5 points of share over the last year in Ireland. This joint initiative will see Origina and Microsoft target all enterprises in Ireland with more than 25 physical servers.

This announcement follows Origina’s recent investment of more than €1 million in a private cloud infrastructure which will enable customers to move quickly and seamlessly to a virtualised environment.  Origina will provide a fast and highly efficient consolidation service as businesses opt to virtualise their server environments.  Origina will also provide 24x7x365 proactive management of all new virtualised solutions from its managed service headquarters in Dublin.

Origina and Microsoft Ireland have already proven experience working together in the virtualisation space.  Origina recently captured an award at the 2010 European IT Excellence Awards, in recognition of a virtualised solution provided to Lakeland Dairies, one of Ireland’s leading dairy co-ops.  Utilising Microsoft Hyper-V, Origina consolidated 35 physical servers into 2 virtual servers, with 70% saving on power and cooling costs, and disaster recovery reduced from 5 days to less than 2 hours.

Martin Cullen, Director, Small, Medium Business & Partner Group, Microsoft Ireland, said, “We are delighted to have Origina onboard as a  virtualisation and cloud computing partner in Ireland due to its extensive experience and high quality customer base in the enterprise market.  They have designed and built a unique blueprint for end-to-end server virtualisation, which provides significant cost and service benefits for customers.  We believe our new joint offering will be a huge success and will provide a much needed alternative for Irish enterprises.”

Tomas O’Leary, Managing Director, Origina, said, “This is the latest exciting development for Origina as we look to keep investing in our infrastructure and solutions portfolio.  Microsoft is an obvious choice of partner as its virtualisation technology is more dynamic, intuitive and much better value than the alternatives.  We plan to shake up the Irish enterprise market by continuing to introduce simple, effective and low-cost solutions that will ultimately make life much easier for CIOs and IT directors.”

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