Thinking about tomorrow today

Applications and IT from a single source, with consultancy on an equal footing and excellent services—this is how middle-market customers in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland have come to know and love MAIT. To be able to guarantee these qualities in the future, the digitalization partner has set a strategic course for the future of its business: Since the start of 2024, MAIT has been optimizing its data center architecture and migrating to the HPE GreenLake platform in a new colocation environment. All part of the package: utmost flexibility, scalability, and control.

Whether it's optimizing processes, developing digitalization strategies, or rolling out IT solutions—wherever a middle-market company in Germany, Austria or Switzerland is facing a digital challenge, that's where MAIT wants to be. A digitalization partner on an equal footing, leading the way, and right at the heart of things—that's how MAIT defines itself. The name says it all: MAIT is a coined term derived from “mate” for partner, “AI” for artificial intelligence, and “IT”.
"Our customers value our proximity and trustworthiness just as much as our innovative ideas for their IT needs. Applications and IT—with us, you get it all from a single source. That’s what sets us apart. And that is what we will continue to build our business success on in the future," Stefan Niehusmann explains. The CEO of the MAIT Group, which has around 650 employees and serves over 6,000 customers in the German-speaking region from 24 locations, is in no doubt that this requires a powerful and modern IT infrastructure in their own data center. And, in fact, the MAIT data center in Pforzheim had just that. But rapid growth in the German market took its toll: Space was limited—and the projected capacity growth, especially with customers from "data-hungry areas" like development and design, meant that action was needed.

Reliable IT as the backbone for in-house services

But the cloud was only the start of it. "For us, it wasn't just about an IT project; it was about actively shaping our own future," says Axel Schmied, COO and primarily responsible for the further development of the data center at MAIT, looking back. Because he well knows: The MAIT data center is the backbone of the company's own services and at the same time the operational IT heart for many customers, who often have highly critical systems running on it. "There’s no room for compromise here," Schmied emphasizes. What impact even the slightest "hiccup" in one of these machines would have on MAIT's customers, and subsequently on MAIT itself, simply doesn’t bear thinking about. So there was only one thing for it: The data center needed to be brought up to a new level. Schmied and Co. set about discussing various options at the beginning of 2022. From moving to another location to complete outsourcing and hybrid data center solutions—no end of different options were thought through, researched, planned out, and analyzed. In the end, a highly strategic decision was made: To relocate the company's own data center from Pforzheim to Equinix's highly redundant colocation environment in Frankfurt and to move over to a completely new, in-house IT infrastructure based on HPE GreenLake. The new HPE ProLiant and Apollo servers, together with the HPE Alletra storage systems on which HPE's modern, highly scalable edge-to-cloud platform is based, are to move into the new data center at the end of 2023, with customers of the company's own MAIT.Cloud then migrating in the New Year.

HPE GreenLake ushers in a new data center era

There's a reason the company chose HPE GreenLake: MAIT and HPE share a long-standing partnership. "Our MAIT subsidiary in Austria has maintained close ties with HPE since 1985 and is now a Platinum Partner. This is reflected in our own expertise with the platform, which in turn benefits our customers," Schmied continues. "Without GreenLake, we would have put off modernization for another year," the MAIT COO adds. Because HPE GreenLake was—and still is—exactly what MAIT was looking for: a flexible yet cost-efficient IT architecture model that can grow with the company's own requirements and those of its customers and guarantees maximum scalability and future-proofing in technological terms. And all without high investment costs or long procurement times. Additional capacity is available practically at the click of a mouse, because in the HPE GreenLake model you only pay for what you actually use. "Particularly for a digitalization partner like MAIT, who builds their business on managed services and cloud and data center offerings, our edge-to-cloud platform is a tailor-made solution," concludes Aron Precht, Vice President Channels & Ecosystem DACH at Hewlett-Packard Enterprise Germany. And that’s not all: With the combination of HPE GreenLake and the colocation environment in Germany and the resulting direct connection to the Frankfurt broadband node, MAIT customers also enjoy maximum availability and reliability of their applications.

Heading into the future with confidence

Schmied and his team are correspondingly optimistic about the future. He knows: Once the new data center platform is up and running, MAIT will be able to implement larger projects with its customers more quickly, calculate better and faster, and act more flexibly than before. "As the digitalization partner of choice for the middle market in Germany, we want to grow with our customers. And now we can. Because no matter what the request is, we'll be able to deliver," the COO confidently declares, before concluding: “What more could you want than for your data center to become the best argument for your own services. HPE GreenLake gives us this trump card. Now it's up to us to play it well.”