Arkadin

Subject: International MPLS Managed Network / Compute Cloud
Industry Sector: Business Services - Remote collaboration, video conferencing
Country: Europe/US
Organisation: Arkadin - Global conferencing

Arkadin provide businesses with customized solutions for remote collaboration. Founded ten years ago, the company is consistently recognized for its dynamism and is frequently  awarded for its growth. In September 2010 Arkadin was named ‘International Company of the Year,’ awarded by Ernst & Young.

Arkadin operates within the rapidly expanding global market of remote conferencing, offering value added unified communications. Today in 26 countries, Arkadin assists in the practice Green IT by providing solutions that reduce travel, help companies increase employee productivity and reduce costs.

Arkadin has surrounded itself with world-class companies to ensure the quality of its services globally. It worked for three years with NTT Communications, with whom it forged a successful technology partnership, which was expanded in 2010 to take advantage of new Compute Cloud offering from NTT Europe.

International Expansion 

Arkadin, have been using NTT Communication’s infrastructure to underpin the delivery of its services to customers  worldwide for the last three years.  It first started working with NTT Comm when it was looking to expand its global reach and needed to deploy an international MPLS network.

"At that time, we had reached a voice volume that justified the investment in a private network for voice traffic to the switch,” said Arnaud Lejeune, EVP Operations Arkadin.

“The challenge was obviously financial, but the quality of connection was also crucial, because that is directly felt by the end customer. "

Arkadin  initially wanted to establish a connection on the London - Paris - New York triangle, but the ultimate goal is to connect all 15 countries managed at the time.

The Selection Criteria
Arkadin carried out an extensive selection process, reviewing key operators able to provide at a global connectivity. Significant geographical penetration was an essential factor in the selection criteria.

"We're a global company, but we are still small, which gives us the advantage of being very reactive," says Arnaud Lejeune. “We wanted to find a partner that is aligned with that response. "

Arkadin selected NTT to provide a high level technical solution at a competitive rate. Arnaud Lejeune believes that NTT demonstrated its responsiveness and flexibility and has invested in the project as a small business "while offering the technical guarantees and international coverage of a major player.”

A Growing Project
One year later the project extended to a dozen of additional country locations and required a more technically complex solution. Arkadin again looked to the market to ensure it was receiving the most competitive offer from its providers and a solution that best fits its needs. After evaluating proposals from many ICT vendors, Arkadin found renewed confidence in NTT. It believed NTT offered superior network quality and customer support.

NTT was able to provide secure and redundant network access, with very strong commitments in terms of service availability, recovery time and latency. Eight sites are fully redundant with two separate local loops on each site. The loops are connected to two different POPs: offering to Arkadin’s customers maximum availability. Monitoring is in place at each site allowing Arkadin to analyze network performance.

Convinced by the technical qualities of the NTT solution, Arkadin also appreciated NTT’s consultative approach and the high quality of customer service.

"We also provide our customers with technical and commercial support in each country. We're joined in this view of the customer relationship,” says Lejeune.

Concrete Results Achieved in Record Time
For Arkadin, the success of the project is measured in terms of reduced costs and speed of implementation.

"We were able to switch several million monthly minutes onto the network in a very short time. The network now carries a significant amount of our international traffic,” says Lejeune.

The reactivity of NTT is especially appreciated and is essential in an industry that is constantly evolving, and must respond quickly to new needs of its customers.

Arkadin Selects NTT Europe Compute Cloud
Late in 2010, Arkadin decided to outsource the hosting of the test and pre-production environments that underpin their critical customer applications. Based on the good relationship the two businesses already shared, it looked to NTT to provide a Compute Cloud environment. The solution would provide Arkadin with virtual storage capacity available and provisioned on-demand through a customer portal. Virtual servers can be pre-configured and quickly activated within hours to meet peak demand.  Compute Cloud is hosted within NTT secure data centres, providing all the scalability and flexibility of public cloud but with the security you would expect with a traditional managed hosting solution.  

"We need resources increasingly important to our internal information systems,” says Arnaud Lejeune, “and buying servers do not allow the necessary responsiveness to our business. "

NTT Communications Commercial Director in France, Jean-Louis Nicolle said "We are pleased to continue our partnership with Arkadin, whose dynamism allows us to demonstrate our responsiveness and customer closeness. "

Arnaud Lejeune, Arkadin said "NTT’s technical solution and the international coverage allow us to guarantee the best service to our customers and consider our developments intelligently. "