XIOLINK, LLC is an MSP based in St. Louis, and so it was somehow fitting the company nabbed an award in its home town.
The MSP, which has a set of managed infrastructure and managed hosting services, last week earned the Founders Award, given out at the recent Gateway to Innovation (g2i) conference.
The g2i conference, now in its seventh year, takes place annually in St. Louis and focuses on IT best practices, as well as offering a way for IT pros to network (as people, not devices!). This year nearly, a thousand people attended.
The award is for both supporting the g2i conference and for helping out the area tech community.
But What about XIOLINK?
An award like this is really just a jumping off point to talk about the company itself. After all, there are thousands of MSPs to choose from, and these companies can easily get lost in the MSP weeds.
While based in St. Louis, the privately-held XIOLINK serves mid-market customers worldwide.
Besides managed hosting and infrastructure, the company also has private cloud and collocation services.
The services are based on Tier 3 datacenters, which, the company argues, lets it talk about 100 percent uptime and offer what it claims are strong SLAs. The datacenters have backup power that lets it run at full load for 24 hours after a major outage. “We also have two separate power feeds on two different Ameren circuits, which enable us to guarantee 100 percent uptime for all of our clients,” the company said.
Protecting data is both physical and digital security. On the digital side are intrusion detection system (IDS) and intrusion prevention system (IPS). The premises are battened down with CCTV, biometrics and carefully restricted access.
And if it’s speed you need, the company claims it has the goods. “We provide an intelligently routed network that improves performance by 40 percent over standard BGP networks, making sure your data follows the most efficient path available,” the company said.
A Market on the Move
The managed infrastructure market is in its early stages, according to Forrester Research. “Small and medium-size businesses (SMBs) are comfortable paying a provider to fix their hardware or networks if they break, but the idea of contracting for IT infrastructure support before there's trouble is a foreign concept,” the research house argues.
Now lots of providers, from telco and distributors, to hardware makers and VARs, are jumping in. And the water should be fine. “This market will reach $4.3 billion in the U.S. by 2013, with most of the opportunity skewed to smaller firms of 20 to 99 employees,” Forrester said.
Infrastructure managed by XIOLINK includes “servers, data storage, firewalls, network bandwidth, virtualization, load balancing, software licensing and daily back-ups,” XIOLINK explained.
Edited by
Alisen Downey
