MISSISSAUGA, Ont. — Walking into Fusepoint Managed Services Inc.’s front door is like climbing aboard Noah’s Ark: there’s two of everything.
The Vancouver-spawned managed services provider’s new data centre is all about redundancy, starting with twin incoming main feeders from Mississauga Hydro.
The 85,000 sq. ft. facility has three standby generators (one alone could run the centre during a power failure), more than 30,000 litres of diesel fuel and two independent universal power supply systems.
The actual data centre area — 25,000 sq. ft. of two foot raised floor — is in the middle of the building, surrounded by the engineering systems — the engineering corridors are one more layer separating the data centre from the outside world.
Entering the facility is like walking into a secret chamber in the Pentagon. In a small lobby visitors sign in with the man behind the glass. Like the rest of the facility, he’s protected with bulletproof glass rated for small bore NATO missiles.
All this is to take a stab at the burgeoning managed services market in Canada, according to Fusepoint CEO Robert Offley. Fusepoint’s focus is on maintaining transaction-heavy Web sites, ERP systems, CRM solutions and disaster recovery.
Offley sees Fusepoint offering more complex solutions than a co-location firm, but not going as far as full-fledged outsourcers such as IBM or EDS.
It was the support and quality of Fusepoint’s technical people that impressed Blair Whelan, CTO and founder of RewardStream. The Vancouver-based firm manages customer loyalty, retention and rewards programs for large companies, including Canadian-based Telus Mobility and Grand & Toy. “”Because our clients are very large they need a high level of comfort in terms of the security of the installation, the reliability and the uptime,”” says Whelan.
RewardStream’s proprietary platform helps its customers roll out loyalty programs quickly and can be integrated with their billing or CRM systems. All of this happens at Fusepoint. “”What Fusepoint does for us is provide the data centre infrastructure. They really provide our complete operations for us. We don’t need to have operations people.””