BMIT Ltd, Malta’s largest data centre services provider, has made a direct investment of over €1,000,000 spread over 3 years, in a new cloud platform, to enable a range of new infrastructure-as-a-service and software-as-a-service solutions.
The platform, which is now accessible through the company’s portal – www.bmit.com.mt - allows for on-demand and real-time cloud computing power and resources, at highly competitive rates. Shortly, new cloud services such as storage, hosted exchange and collaboration as well as other SaaS services will be added to the company’s cloud portfolio.
“This is the first major direct investment in a cloud infrastructure in Malta,” said Christian Sammut, Chief Executive Officer at BMIT. “The cloud platform will enable customers to benefit from the scalability and flexibility offered by such platforms in order to access several infrastructure and software as-a-service applications. With no long-term commitments we are seeking to provide the most effective delivery mechanisms to our customers. A key differential offering from other services available on the web will be the personalised attention and the 24/7 local support which our partners and customers will be receiving.”
BMIT has, over these last years, established itself as one of the leading providers of co-location, hosting and managed services to online gaming companies in Europe.It is currently diversifying its product offering and now also provides services to a wide range of customers, including those in the financial services, legal, architecture, IT solutions and retail businesses among others.
The company operates 2 data centres in Malta, with full power and multiple communications redundancy, complemented by the highest standard of operation, management and security, befitting a data centre set-up which provides services to companies with multi-million turnovers, all dependent on the services which BMIT provides them.
21st March 2012: BMIT Limited, Malta’s leading co-location and hosting services provider, has announced the appointment of two new senior executives, responsible for the commercial, marketing and business development initiatives of the company. Nick Tonna and Jack Mizzi join BMIT at a time when the company is expanding its product offering in the market, mainly through its new cloud offering, as well as a new and enhanced suite of managed services. They will form part of the management team together with Chief Executive Officer Christian Sammut and Chief Technical Officer Gordon Bezzina.
Jack Mizzi will be responsible for marketing and business development. He is a highly experienced manager in telecoms and broadband services, specialising in marketing and business development. He has developed and managed broadband and bandwidth initiatives for one of Malta's leading communication companies, and was responsible for product development, marketing communications and wholesale-related functions. Subsequently he managed GO plc’s content function spanning web portal management, newsroom and digital TV, as well associated e-commerce and advertising sales functions. Jack is a graduate in Management from the University of Malta and holds an MSc in Marketing from the University of Leicester.
Nick Tonna will be responsible for the commercial function. He joins BMIT from Microsoft where he led the enterprise business segment and was responsible for managing and developing the relationships with Microsoft’s enterprise customers in Malta. Amongst various other achievements, Nick secured the first large-scale deployments of Cloud-based services and played a key role in the recent strategic partnership agreement with the Government of Malta. He was recognised with the Worldwide Circle of Excellence Award for his performance. Prior to joining Microsoft, Nick managed a number of ICT transformation projects including the implementation of a service management programme at the Government’s IT agency. Nick is a graduate in ICT from the University of Malta, specialising in Business Information Systems at Virginia Commonwealth University, USA.
“Jack and Nick join at a very interesting time for BMIT. We are working towards enhancing our offering to existing customers, as well as tapping into new markets and segments with new services. Our data centre-based offerings will now be complemented with our investment in a cloud platform to enable a new range of new infrastructure-as–a-service and software-as-a-service solutions,” said Christian Sammut, Chief Executive Officer at BMIT.
BMIT, a subsidiary of GO plc, is Malta’s leading provider of hosting co-location services for internet and data services, providing reliable and secure facilities to a wide range of customers requiring data centre and communication related services. BMIT established itself as a leading online gaming service provider in Europe and is the partner of choice for iGaming solutions in Malta and beyond. It is now rapidly extending its offering to non-gaming customers, including financial organisations, as well as an increasing number of corporate and SMEs. Through an alliance and strategic collaboration with leading European operators, BMIT is now present in major cities across Europe and plans are in place to extend their reach beyond Europe. Such an alliance allows BMIT’s customers to benefit from geo-neutral co-location and associated services through a one-stop shop arrangement.
BMIT CEO Christian Sammut on cloud services: “This is the next big thing. It will cause a paradigm shift in the way we consume and work around IT.”
20th March 2012: BMIT, a member of the Go group, is set to launch its new cloud platform and infrastructure in the next few days. This pioneering initiative for cloud computing in Malta will enable the company to expand its data centre services and provide facilities in one of the hotwww emerging trends in computing. BMIT is the only data centre with a fibre-optic connection to all three local communications providers
“Cloud computing is an evolution of various ICT developments over many years and many consider it to be the successor of grid computing and hosted services,” BMIT chief executive officer Christian Sammut told i-Tech.
“I don’t particularly like the term cloud services as it might give the impression that it is something unclear and unstable, when in fact it is a delivery framework based on very robust technologies and architectures. But yes, all indicators are that this is the next big thing, which will cause a paradigm shift in the way we consume and work around IT.”
Go acquired a stake in Maltese online services company BMIT a few years back and wholly acquired it in July last year. BMIT operates at an arm’s length from Go and works closely with Go’s competitors in terms of internet access services to ensure that it provides top connectivity services available in Malta.
BMIT operates two data centres locally with a footprint of over 1,000 square metres and 300 server racks. It is the only data centre in Malta with a fibre-optic connection to all three Maltese communications providers, which link Malta to the rest of the world through their four undersea fiber-optic cables. The data centres are built to Tier III specifications, though not yet certified as such.
As part its diversification strategy, BMIT has been gradually adding new services to its portfolio, and from being a pure co-location company it now offers new services such as virtual private servers, several hosting options, as well as the management of services in a hosted environment.
The next step in this process is the launch of its own cloud computing platform, which will allow it to offer a range of cloud infrastructure services, computing-on-demand, and eventually several software-as-a-service applications with partners. This is an important milestone and a major investment for BMIT, well exceeding €1 million over the coming months.
Like all new trends, cloud computing presents its opportunities and challenges, especially for a small country like Malta.
“The two major challenges to us are the market size and the need to raise awareness and inform the market of the benefits that cloud services bring to businesses. Although research we have been undertaking clearly shows a rather high level of knowledge and interest, it is still our intention to explain the benefits of our offering better. Market size is a challenge and also an opportunity since the cloud allows us to extend our reach beyond Malta.
“It is not our intention to compete with Amazon or Microsoft head on. Our cloud services are obviously being designed to be very competitive in terms of price and features. However, we are also offering additional benefits such as flexibility and customisation and even more important, 24x7 local and personalised support,” Mr Sammut explained.
i-Tech was shown the online cloud services system where BMIT customers can buy computing power in terms of processors, memory and operating system with a few simple clicks on a website.
The computing power can be used right away. This is called infrastructure-as-a-service, consisting of computing on demand and a virtual private server offering.
BMIT is also planning to roll-out software-as-a-service. Some services such as hosted mail and collaboration will be offered directly, with others offered in collaboration with partners. The benefits of using SaaS are many but possibly the most obvious are ease of access to applications in pay-as-you-go fashion in contrast to having to buy expensive infrastructure, including hardware and license fees. There is also the advantage of doing away with software upgrades and maintenance since these would be catered for by the SaaS provider. All this goes on to build on the success of recent years where Malta had attracted online gaming companies and provided them with a good legal framework as well technology services. BMIT has, over these last years, established itself as one of the leading providers of co-location, hosting and managed services to online gaming companies in Europe.
“The gaming industry is an extremely important industry for Malta and thousands of people are employed directly or indirectly. Additionally millions of euros are injected into the Maltese economy by the hundreds of operators established here. This has been possible through online gaming legislation which Malta has adopted and kept constantly updated, as well as the fiscal incentives for operators establishing their business here,” Mr Sammut added.
Over these last months, BMIT has been investing heavily in new technologies and skill sets to extend its data centre expertise into other areas. As a result, the company is providing services to a wider range of customers, including those in financial services, legal, architecture, IT solutions and retail businesses, among others.
10th November 2011: The ICON newsletter issued today gave prominence to the launch of the new BMIT website with an article and overview of features provided.
BMIT's website is one of the latest works produced by this leading web development company.
The site's launch was also given prominence in national media including:
The Times
The Sunday Times
di-ve.com
Malta Business Weekly
maltastar.com
27th October 2011: The Malta Business Weekly carried an interview by its editor Noel Grima with Christian Sammut, Chief Executive Officer of BMIT, regarding the launch of the new Cloud platform: Malta’s largest data centre services provider launches a cloud platform by Noel Grima
Last week’s issue of this paper reported that Malta’s largest data centre services provider BMIT Limited, announced that it will be investing in a cloud platform to enable a range of new Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions. This will be the first direct investment in a cloud infrastructure in Malta. Noel Grima interviewed Christian Sammut
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Operating from a state-of-the-art facility in Handaq, BMIT offers its services not just to Maltese but also to foreign companies.
BMIT, its CEO Christian Sammut tells me, is a fully owned subsidiary of GO. The company’s origins go back approximately 10 years when the company used to provide bulletin board services to business customers. Over time, the company developed into a specialised provider of data centre services, at that time still a growing industry. As Malta became a leading jurisdiction for online remote gaming services, BMIT became the one of the industry’s largest providers for data centre services and approximately three years ago, GO purchased 60% of the company. Earlier this year in June, GO completed its acquisition of the remaining shares in BMIT.
Mr Sammut started his career in the private sector with the Dowty Group following an assignment overseas within the aerospace industry. He joined MITTS in 1992, where he was responsible for the delivery and support of IT infrastructure services, as well as for the management and operations of government’s data centres. In 2001, Mr Sammut joined the Maltacom Group to setup Innovate Limited. In the following years, he held various positions at GO including that of chief of Strategy and Business Development, until more recently, he was appointed chief executive officer at BMIT.
BMIT operates two facilities – one is a data centre in Qormi and this at Tal-Handaq is its prime site. The company took over a shell form premises at Handaq over three years ago and it is now a transformed and completely refurbished, state-of-the-art and fully secure data centre facility.
Data centre clients are typically companies who have realised that keeping their IT infrastructure at their premises does not make operational or financial sense and is not entirely secure or convenient. Others by design opt to leave their IT infrastructure requirements to the data centre operator and consequently focus exclusively on their core business.
Currently, BMIT mainly provides co-location services and increasingly managed services for customers hosting their services and infrastructure in any one of its data centres. It rents out space, provides a secure environment with access control, fire protection and the resiliency that is required by companies who want to co-locate their critical systems and keep their data accessible and safe in any circumstance. By way of example, in the case of a power failure, BMIT has stand by UPS systems and four huge generators able to operate autonomously for over a week.
BMIT’s operations, Mr Sammut tells me, is somewhat similar to the business of property leasing, where the landlord furnishes offices with everything included so that clients just have to turn the key and start working. All the required equipment and connections are already in place – the tenant does not have to worry about such matters.
One of the big advantages that BMIT has is that it is connected to all four fibre optic submarine cables connecting Malta to the world. This ensures that its clients, who normally require internet connectivity on a 24x7 basis with no allowance for downtime, are always up and accessible to the world.
BMIT is currently expanding its business operations to non-gaming customers. The initial take-up has been very promising, with businesses from various industries, including retail and financial services, co-locating their servers or using virtual private servers offered by BMIT. The underlying reason is that a data centre that can handle the high bandwidth, high availability and high security requirements of multi-million euro gaming operators can surely handle the requests of similar size or smaller organisations in different industries.
To provide the best service possible, BMIT complies with the very demanding requests made by regulators all over Europe and regularly updates its services to the lawww industry requirements. The company is also PCI certified, which means it can operate a data centre and network which supports payment transactions and within a few weeks, the company expects to get certified to ISO 27001 levels.
The efforts to transform BMIT from a gaming co-location facility to a fully-fledged managed services provider are being further enhanced with a substantial investment in new services and technologies, chief among these is cloud technology. This announcement that BMIT is to launch a cloud platform comes following the successful launch of an initial suite of cloud services earlier this year, where customer take-up has proven to be very encouraging. In fact a number of locally based and international clients are now subscribed to a range of virtualisation and storage services offered through any one of BMIT’s data centres in Malta.
In light of this, BMIT is now reviewing and revisiting its own strategy to be able to provide even more client services. “A considerable number of customers are showing interest in our current range of cloud services since we provide all the benefits of the cloud but complement it with a suite of managed services as well as with focused and personalised attention which cannot be always achieved if an offshore location is opted for,” Mr Sammut commented.
The new cloud infrastructure is scheduled for launch very early next year and will offer a suite of infrastructure, communication and collaboration services to SMEs and corporations. “Our cloud platform will allow our customers to benefit from the scalability and flexibility offered by cloud platforms, thus allowing our customers to access services such as cloud computing on an on-demand basis.
“With no long-term commitments and up-front expenses, we are seeking to provide the most cost-effective delivery mechanism to our customers.
“A key differential of our offering from other services available on the web will be the personalised attention and round-the-clock local support which our partners and customers will be receiving,” added BMIT’s CEO.
On the internet there are a full variety of companies offering cloud services, including giants such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft. BMIT acknowledges that competing just on price with such massive companies is a futile exercise and it is thus focusing its efforts to complement its highly affordable services with other benefits, such as providing 24x7 manned local support, in contrast to some automated or canned-reply call centre in some other part of the planet.
“A local company many times feels it is one of many thousands and when an automated system handles requests and demands, for service or support, they are many times part of a long queue. There thus exists a need for a cloud which is based in Malta, with a provider who can understand local customer requirements. Such a local cloud can offer tailor made services for the Maltese business community.”
One other advantage with having a Maltese cloud is that data and transactions are kept local. As a result, customers know exactly where their data is stored. This is relevant for all businesses, and especially for those with specific regulatory requirements which oblige them to retain their data in Malta. Once the cloud infrastructure is put in place, customers will be able to access BMIT’s services through a web portal through which they will be able to select and access those services they require online. All services will be automated and simple to access and operate.
BMIT is also working with a number of local software development companies to develop applications that can be offered to Maltese customers according to their specific needs and requirements. “These software houses will be given a platform across which they can offer software as a service to customers in Malta and globally without the need to invest in the high availability and redundant infrastructure required in such instances,” explained Mr Sammut.
BMIT’s cloud is a public one, but the company will also provide its customers with a private cloud service, for specific corporate use. BMIT will also be offering a pay-as-you-go cloud computing service, whereby customers will be able to only pay for the usage they require.
Apart from offering these services to local businesses, BMIT also intends to offer these services internationally. Although, as said, its principal customers so far are in the gaming industry it plans to offer the entire range of its services to a wide variety of customers and even to customers from abroad.
For those customers seeking to relocate their business to Malta in order to operate under a company registered in Malta to take advantage of the tax benefits that are obtained by non-resident shareholders, the hosting of systems in a data centre in Malta or the use of a locally based cloud will ensure that such companies can substantively prove that their relevant economic activity is conducted within Maltese territory. This should help such customers withstand any scrutiny by the shareholder’s jurisdiction tax authorities.
Interview at: http://www.maltabusinessweekly.com.mt
14th October 2011: Malta’s largest data centre services provider BMIT Limited, announced that it will be investing in a cloud platform to enable a range of new Infrastructure-as–a-Service (IaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions. This will be the first direct investment in a cloud infrastructure in Malta.
This announcement comes following the successful launch of an initial suite of cloud services earlier this year, where customer take-up has proven to be very encouraging. In fact a number of locally based and international clients are now subscribed to a range of virtualisation and storage services offered through one of BMIT’s data centres in Malta.
“A considerable number of customers are showing interest in our current range of cloud services since we provide all the benefits of the cloud but complement it with a suite of managed services as well as with focused and personalised attention which cannot be achieved if an offshore location is opted for”, commented Christian Sammut, Chief Executive Officer of BMIT.
Having registered such positive results, BMIT now intends to reinforce its position as the first and largest provider of private and public cloud services in Malta, with further investment planned in a state of the art cloud platform. This forms parts of the company strategy of diversification into new market segments. The new cloud infrastructure is scheduled for launch towards the end of this year and will offer a suite of communication and collaboration services to SMEs and corporates.
“Our cloud platform will allow our customers to benefit from the scalability and flexibility offered by cloud platforms, thus allowing our customers to access services such as cloud computing on an on-demand basis. With no long-term commitments and up-front expenses, we are seeking to provide the most cost-effective delivery mechanism to our customers.
A key differential of our offering from other services available on the web will be the personalised attention and round-the-clock local support which our partners and customers will be receiving,” added BMIT’s CEO.
Additionally, independent software vendors (ISVs) will be given a platform across which they can offer software as a service to customers in Malta and globally without the need to invest in the high availability and redundant infrastructure required in such instances.
BMIT Limited operates 2 data centres in Malta and offers a wide range of data centre-related services, including co-location, virtual hosting and managed services. Originally servicing the online gaming industry, BMIT is now diversifying its product offering to support other industries locally and internationally. Considered as one of the leading independent data centres in Europe, BMIT is a 100% owned subsidiary of GO plc.
As a leading data centre for online gaming operators we will, once again, be participating at ICE 2012. In addition to data centre services we will also be introducing new services and offerings specifically to gaming operators - come visit us at Stand # 5675.
To make the most of your visit, we suggest you send us your details below and we will be in touch to set a mutually convenient time to meet.
