Origo, Making management easier for Managed Service Providers
As a leading Nordic IT service company, Origo has over 50 years of experience developing and operating IT systems and services, primarily in Iceland and Sweden. Origo is a publicly traded Managed Service Provider (MSP) headquartered in Reykjavík, Iceland. As an MSP, their values are rooted in providing support and innovative technologies to their customers to give them the best possible IT experiences. These values align closely with the core values of Men&Mice, which is why Origo and Men&Mice have had such a remarkable partnership since 2007.
Origo has around 500 employees with most of their people located in the Nordics. They help customers from every industry from Real Estate to Utilities, both in the public and private sectors. While they have a long tail of SMB (Small-to-Medium Sized Business) customers, they also cater to several larger enterprise customers. All of Origo’s customers have one thing in common, though, which is that they all benefit from the innovation, reliability, and expertise that Origo brings to the table.
Simplifying Customer Operations
Origo uses ISC BIND for external DNS as well as Unbound for caching, and they’re using Microsoft for Internal DNS. Prior to Origo’s partnership with Men&Mice, Origo used mostly native tools to manage DNS as well as DHCP, and IPAM (DDI). When Origo chose Men&Mice back in 2007, they were using only Micetro’s (known then as Men&Mice Suite) DNS management.
“It’s nice to be able to give admins a usable interface to BIND, especially if they’re not familiar with Linux.”
Arnþór Björn Reynisson
Manager - Hosting and Cloud solutions
They have used spreadsheets and other 3rd party tools to manage DHCP and IPAM over the years. However, in 2020, Origo decided it was time to start using Micetro to manage IPAM and DHCP as well. Using the same tool for their entire DDI environment, including customer sites, gives them a complete picture. With Micetro they now have auditing and recorded history for everything that happens, along with centralized role-based access control so they can understand who is making changes, what they’ve changed, and when they change it. This makes troubleshooting much easier and prevents issues from happening in many cases as well.
“Being able to manage DNS from multiple cloud providers is very important, because our customers all have multiple DNS providers, which fast becomes a management nightmare. It can take hours to find where a simple A record is hosted and then make sure we have access to manage it. Having a tool to control and manage quite granularly and quickly is very important to us. It can save hours.”
Arnþór Björn Reynisson
Manager - Hosting and Cloud solutions
Automation in the Multicloud
To provide efficient and performant services to their IT staff and customers, Origo uses automation and orchestration tools to simplify network and service provisioning. On-premises they use VMware vCloud Director and NSX to provide networking, VMs, and security in customer spaces on-premises.
Origo is using Ansible as well as Microsoft Power Automate to automate processes on-premises and in the cloud. By integrating these systems with the Micetro APIs, they’re able to offer self-service portals to their coworkers as well as to their customers. This self-service portal means admins can easily do things like onboard a new VM or services and use the built-in functionality of Micetro to find the correct network range, find and reserve the next available IP, and even get VLAN information based on VMware portgroups IDs.
“Micetro acts as a single source of truth for the entire DDI environment.”
Arnþór Björn Reynisson
Manager - Hosting and Cloud solutions
Managing Customer Spaces
Origo keeps a very organized IP schema and avoids overlapping addresses. Since about a third of their customers come to them with address spaces that overlap their other customers, a common part of onboarding a new customer is migrating them to a new address space. Micetro makes it easier to perform these types of migrations by offering tracking and visibility.
Quality of Life Improvements
Origo believes that using Micetro to replace several different tools to manage their DDI environment has been paramount. It’s simplified operations, it’s led to more consistent implementations, and it has cut down on cost and therefore increased margins. This all results in Origo offering their customers the best services at competitive prices.
“I enjoy using the Men&Mice solution in every aspect over the previous solutions we had. You are definitely expanding the quality of our life in the workplace.”