Case Study
Latitude Consulting Group is a SaaS company founded in 2003 whose mission is to help organizations across the world optimize channel performance and improve the effectiveness of their training and certification programs. Organizations ranging from small startups to Fortune 500 global enterprises use Latitude’s proprietary learning management system (LMS), LatitudeLearning, to better manage the partner and technology programs they use.
After acquiring their LMS in 2005, Latitude realized they had a unique opportunity to scale their business on demand by turning to a third-party services provider. They began searching for local providers they could trust to host their mission-critical applications and infrastructure. Due to the nature of some of their larger clients, they also required a partner who thoroughly understood and practiced the rigorous standards of PCI compliance.
After researching several vendors, Latitude chose OTAVA as their secure, compliant IT partner. Latitude hosts their critical systems within OTAVA’s Ann Arbor data center, which features N+1 redundancy and offers easy accessibility for the Saline, Michigan-based company — their servers are less than 15 minutes away. Latitude also utilizes PCI compliant cloud services at OTAVA’s Mid-Michigan data center. Those servers are completely managed by OTAVA, including patch management and first-responder services.
According to Jeff Walter, CEO of Latitude, picking OTAVA was a natural choice. “When we first started, we were hosting our own systems,” he said. “But as we grew, we realized we needed a data center for our core business. We needed someone we could trust and who was local, and OTAVA was the perfect fit.”
Walter specifically cited OTAVA’s white-glove support and dependability as among the standouts during Latitude’s 13-year partnership with OTAVA.
As Latitude looks to the future, scalability is key. Walter is excited about the fact that he can easily scale his data center as business demands and leverage specialized compliant environments such as HIPAA or PCI as his clients request. No matter what his future business demands are, he is confident he can rely on OTAVA to provide the same steady support he’s always received.
“I think it’s been a really good partnership,” Walter said. “When you strip everything away, we essentially rely on OTAVA to support mission-critical systems for Fortune 500 companies. We need our IT provider to be rock solid for us because these are large, global companies that trust their mission-critical systems to us. That’s where the relationship with OTAVA has really shone. They’ve been extremely reliable, and the team will do whatever it takes to help us get online as quickly as possible. We need that type of reliability and that type of service, and if we had gone with someone like Rackspace or AWS or Azure, we would just be one of a million and would not get that same level of attention when help is needed.”
With OTAVA, Latitude Consulting Group gained the local partner and trusted IT ally they were looking for. They are assured their mission-critical systems are always on and always available, and that their sensitive data is secure and compliant with PCI regulations.
