TeraSky's Deep Expertise Helps it Architect and Deploy Innovative Customer Solutions for Rapid Digital Transformation
“Most companies aren’t changing as quickly as technology,” says Ofir Abekasis. He should know. He’s the CEO for TeraSky, a technology integrator with headquarters in Israel that serves organizations of all sizes around the world. It combines traditional IT with public, private, and hybrid cloud technologies to help companies achieve their goals, to expand and scale with confidence during an era of rapid transformation.
Every year, VMware honors a distinguished group of partners from around the world with the VMware Partner Achievement Awards for delivering exceptional results and innovation using VMware products and solutions. This year, TeraSky won the inaugural 2021 VMware Partner of the Year Award for demonstrating excellence across the board after placing as a top finalist in all five core award categories.
TeraSky has more than 500 satisfied customers that have worked with the company in its more than 800 successful deployments. The company specializes in two key areas: cloud-native applications and cloud infrastructure. It focuses on VMware Tanzu for its cloud-native infrastructure, providing Kubernetes services up to the application layer. “We work closely with R&D groups, DevOps groups, and CTO offices to understand our customers’ business challenges so we can build the pipeline for the development of continuous integration and continuous deployment CI/CD processes,” Abekasis says.
For private clouds, TeraSky exports services using the VMware Aria Suite, helping customers speed the development process and enjoy faster time to market. For public clouds, TeraSky adopts VMware Cloud on AWS for customers that want to expand their data centers, deploying all relevant use cases that VMware on AWS can offer, including hybrid cloud solutions, disaster recovery, data center migration, and more.
“Moving customers from the traditional consumption of hardware to cloud models requires a dedicated practice,” says Abekasis. “Our delivery and support teams provide DevOps services, DevSecOps services, real-time monitoring, optimization, and data protection for all environments.”
Better Online Banking with VMware Tanzu
TeraSky recently deployed an enterprise-grade ecosystem on VMware Tanzu for Raiffeisen Bank, one of Europe’s largest financial institutions. The bank wanted to invest its digital energy in online banking and mobile applications, with online customer chat as a priority due to its enormous business potential.
Raiffeisen Online was originally deployed on a vanilla Kubernetes environment, and the bank wanted to shift its entire cloud-native infrastructure to an enterprise-grade Kubernetes ecosystem that provided maximum security and the ability to scale.
After performing a broad market analysis, Raiffeisen asked TeraSky to implement that ecosystem on VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid. They chose the VMware solution because it offers multi-Kubernetes clusters that would allow the bank to deploy, upgrade, and scale multiple clusters through a single management console. In addition, it gives the bank end-to-end visibility through a holistic networking solution for both container- and VM-based workloads.
As TeraSky’s engagement with the bank began, the team faced an additional challenge: the COVID-19 pandemic, which halted in-person travel and meetings. TeraSky worked on the project with the bank via videoconferencing, emails, and phone calls. Abekasis says, “We did what we had to do given the circumstances.” It’s a true testament to TeraSky’s dedication to client success that they helped the bank achieve so much in such a challenging time.
Now the bank’s IT team can deliver resilient enterprise-grade Kubernetes as a service to its entire organization. Existing cloud-native applications have been migrated to the production clusters with assured service level agreements. Additionally, DevOps teams can absorb and implement best practices and get insights on DevOps methodologies directly from TeraSky experts.
The results? Monthly usage of Raiffeisen Online increased from 80 percent to nearly 100 percent, and the share of loans offered via online banking rose from 50 percent to more than 80 percent.
Revenue Growth Powered by Artificial Intelligence
TeraSky also recently worked on a project for one of the largest online social gaming companies in the world. The company’s entire infrastructure is built on VMware technology across multiple data centers, and its biggest challenges are monitoring, troubleshooting, and solving malfunctions in the environment. The environment produces terabytes of logs and events every day, and there are countless dependencies between infrastructure components and software. Those two factors make it difficult to monitor and detect issues before they cause trouble for users.
All of these challenges multiplied when the COVID-19 pandemic hit. The company experienced a huge growth in the number of users and the amount of time spent on the platform as people looked for entertainment while spending more time at home.
TeraSky used artificial intelligence operations (AIOps) with advanced algorithms and machine learning models to detect issues that could lead to a malfunction. AIOps works by identifying anomalies in the environment that might cause a malfunction that degrades the user experience. It sends environment logs through the vRealize Log Insights analysis tool to the anomaly detection service, then presents customized dashboards in VMware vRealize Operations that can reveal potential trouble spots.
Now the company can efficiently identify and mitigate potential problems and has decreased its time to resolution by hundreds of engineering hours. The gaming platform is more stable, and users are spending more time on it, resulting in a revenue growth of approximately 30 percent.
Investing Heavily in Competency and Expertise
“Our superpower is our ability to architect, sell, implement, and support,” Abekasis says. It can do all these things because, as he puts it, “excellence is in our DNA.” TeraSky invests heavily in knowledge, certifications, and competencies to develop the expertise needed to design technical solutions and the mastery to deploy them.
TeraSky has been a VMware partner since 2010 and has earned all seven Master Service Competencies (MSCs) that prove mastery in a specific VMware solution area:
- Cloud Management and Automation
- Data Center Virtualization
- Network Virtualization
- Digital Workspace
- Cloud Native Apps
- VMware Cloud Foundation
- VMware Cloud on AWS
These are not easy to achieve, and only a handful of partners have managed to earn all of them. Passing exams isn’t enough. A certain number of TeraSky’s customers also needed to vouch for the company.
“Our customers choose us as their partner,” Abekasis says, “because they know that changes in the IT market, the modernization of data centers, moving to the cloud, and the replatforming of applications all require mastery that can only be acquired through years of experience.”
Stay tuned for more spotlights on our 2021 VMware Partner Achievement Award winners just like this one. Interested in becoming a VMware Partner? Learn about the VMware Partner Connect program. Looking for a VMware Partner like TeraSky? Find one using our Partner Locator. Then learn how VMware Principal Partners can help drive your business success.
