The below article was published recently in IT Brief New Zealand magazine.

The -aaS consumption model is nothing new when it comes down to brass tacks – it’s exactly how we’ve been consuming electricity ever since Edison and Tesla were squabbling.

Over the last 130 or so years, electricity consumption has risen and with it, the cost.

This is why Total Utilities stepped in to help businesses in New Zealand ensure that their power costs were being thoughtfully managed through analysis of quantitative and qualitative data.

Now, the team at Total Utilities have brought their years of experience and the array of tools at their disposal to help enterprises transition to the cloud in the most cost-effective and outcome-focused way possible.

Total Utilities strategy and transformation director David Spratt explained that as a company that specialises in the analysis of data, migration to the cloud is a no-brainer.

“The intellectual battle over the cloud is done,” Spratt says.

“if you haven’t heard about the multitude of advantages that public cloud can bring to any organisation, then you haven’t been listening. To be competitive from our corner of the world, you need to be using world-class technology and today, that means public cloud.”

Every day, more enterprises move onto the cloud. Every day, another startup is born there, ready to displace their predecessors. And every day, you have someone else tell you that if you don’t move now, you’re done for.

Total Utilities is not interested in this kind of manic hyperbole. In fact, the team’s knowledge and expertise in the cloud was inspired not just by their love of the tech, but more importantly by their passion for saving money for their clients.

“As a completely vendor-agnostic consultancy, we aren’t trying to convince anyone to spend more or upsell to products they don’t need,” Spratt explains.

“If your company has brand new servers that are fully functional and ticking along happily, you probably aren’t interested in migrating everything right now. We understand that and want to guide both IT specialists and C-level executives to make the right decisions about what should be moved, how it should be moved, and when to move it.”

Total Utilities helps organisations bridge the communication gap between IT and the C-suite, speaking both languages, and suggesting clear, evidence-based options that are all about making life easy for the techies, and making money for the execs.

This is not some upstart company aiming to build their experience – for the last five years, they have worked with New Zealand’s major kiwifruit exporter and agricultural giant Zespri, providing financial insights and ongoing evidence of the value that migrating to Azure has brought.

“We said to Zespri, ‘Are you really in the business of owning and operating IT?’ And of course they’re not,” Spratt elaborates.

“But certain key services they have to deliver. So how do you get out of the business of owning and operating tin boxes that go ping, and into the business of providing all the services that give a business strategic advantages?”

Total Utilities performed assessments in every area to see what the cloud could offer. They looked at the obvious benefits like the ability to copy/paste their systems for deployment in any country, simplified disaster recovery and backup, and the ability to scale up or down based on crop yield.

Scalability ended up being a key driver for Zespri as this transformation occurred at the same time as the much-publicised Psa disease that threatened to wipe out their gold kiwifruit stock.

Zespri wasn’t sure if it would end up with shipping numbers dropping from 80 million to 40 million, or if a new strain of fruit would take successfully and end up yielding 140 million. Total Utilities showed them how being in the cloud would mean they were ready for any eventuality.

But then they even dug deeper, looking at the cost per square metre of housing private servers, power costs, and the depreciation of hardware over time.

Today, Zespri still sits on Azure and continues to work with Total Utilities to ensure that it is always in the best position to achieve its goals as one of New Zealand’s biggest organisations.

Now, Total Utilities wants to help your organisation be as profitable and streamlined as it can possibly be – get in touch today to find out how.