I stumbled upon Open Minds by accident during one of my research days, and I was very glad that I did. Based in the heart of Birmingham this little-known firm has been helping businesses for over a decade but have not been shouting loudly enough to get noticed in the way they deserve. Established by a small group of consultants in 1990, Open Minds serve corporate clients and managed service providers (MSP’s) across a wide range of industries. They started business initially by providing technical training and consultancy in Unix, C and C++ and over the decades evolved into being a provider of specialist application recovery products and services.
One of the main strengths that Open Minds have under their belt is clustering configuration, implementation and support. Clustering systems can be tricky at the best of times but try that within a multi-cloud approach and it’s a scary notion.
I had the pleasure of meeting Open Minds on several occasions, most recently at the Channel Live event in Birmingham where I interviewed Bipin Patel, Technical Director at Open Minds (click here to watch). Bipin, AKA “Mr Cluster” as I call him, has a great story to tell with a vast amount of knowledge within the industry (over decades) of high availability clustering – but modest with it.
High availability for database clusters can be a scary notion to the uninitiated, but that’s what makes Bipin get out of bed in the morning (his words). Wait, that’s not what I want to get across here. Open Minds have a very unique proposition that I am sure you have not heard or seen before – Public cloud dev, test and implementation for HA clusters across the major public cloud providers. Let’s face it, how much assistance would you expect from your public cloud provider when scoping, testing and implementation of your complicated HA database cluster? Err do I need to answer that really?
[easy-tweet tweet=”Open Minds conduct global support for the SIOS software product range” hashtags=”Open Minds, IT”]
Once thought of as an unmovable part of IT Infrastructure, you can now have the flexibility (and cost) of public cloud infrastructure for your complex clustering environments, safe with the knowledge that IT DOES WORK and you are in the hands of a true expert. Additionally, Open Minds conduct global support for the SIOS software product range too, making after-hours support easier if needs be.
I know what you may be thinking – this article is weighted heavily as an advert for Open Minds, but really this is not the intention. After 1000’s of providers we have interviewed, Open Minds are one of the first that cater for public cloud adoption for a very niche set of products. We all know some of the benefits of public cloud adoption but did you know that there is a company that could plan, migrate and support your complex database clustering needs? I like this team as they haven’t advertised, marketed or even run sales campaigns to gain traction within the industry and they deserve some recognition for that alone. However, with the “CMaaS – Cluster Migration as a Service” options (yes I did make that acronym up) delivered by them for public cloud adoption are unique. ISV’s, MSP’s, Database providers as well as SI’s if you haven’t come across them before then do look them up.
To hear more from Open Minds tune into our live stream from IP Expo where Bipin will be interviewed at 2:30 pm on 5th October: https://www.disruptive.live/machina/
Neil Cattermull, Director of Cloud Practice, Compare the Cloud
Neil's focus is on developing cloud technology and big data. You can often find him advising CXOs on cloud strategy.
