Hanu and the art of having fewer problems

The first clouds are easy. Move a server nobody is terribly worried about, watch it work, and the future seems agreeably simple. Then comes the machine that the organization cannot afford to lose. Suddenly, everyone discovers a deep affection for the cupboard downstairs.

The MS Society of Canada reached a version of this impasse. It had moved less critical workloads, but getting the important ones out safely exceeded what it could do alone. Hanu helped assess the remaining estate, plan the move and resolve a server issue with Microsoft. Its case study reports 21 servers migrated with zero downtime, a 27% reduction in monthly operating costs and at least $200,000 in avoided hardware spending.

That is a useful place to begin with Hanu. “Cloud transformation” can sound like something delivered to a boardroom by a man carrying three identical diagrams. Here, the problem was concrete: an organization wanted its technical team to have time for work beyond tending infrastructure. Hanu’s business lived in the distance between buying cloud capacity and being able to depend on it.

The migration that ran out of road

A stalled migration is a revealing sales opportunity. The customer already wants the destination. The argument concerns who can get it there without making a dreadful mess. That changes what expertise must look like: someone has to inspect the awkward workloads, decide what should move, and take responsibility when the apparently routine machine proves awkward.

The society’s case included 20 servers selected for rehosting and a Windows 7 machine marked for retirement or rebuilding. It also described sponsorship that saved more than $10,000 on migration. These are reported results from a particular engagement, rather than a price list. The full contract cost cannot be calculated from those savings.

The lesson is less glamorous than the cloud advertisements. An inventory comes first. Some things move relatively directly; others require a different decision. A capable partner earns its fee by making those distinctions before deployment. A team that merely transfers an existing mess has given it a new address, which is a rather expensive form of correspondence.

A cloud bill with a human attached

In Microsoft’s historical account of Hanu’s work with engineering consultancy Mott MacDonald, one solution had annual hosting costs of roughly $40,000. Hanu estimated Azure consumption at $12,000-$15,000, then added managed services for a total near $20,000. A proof of concept preceded migration. Further optimization reportedly removed another $5,000 a year.

The interesting calculation includes the person running the service. Comparing a server bill with an Azure estimate alone is an incomplete exercise. Monitoring, patching and responding to trouble still consume labor. Hanu’s model combined implementation projects with an ongoing operational relationship. The customer could buy a move and then buy help living with it.

Hanu also sold visibility. Microsoft’s 2019 Marketplace announcement described Hanu Insight as a tool for tracking spend, budgets, chargeback and invoicing. Hanu Managed Azure included round-the-clock monitoring, configuration, security management and spending optimization. The software product called Insight predated the acquisition by the company called Insight. Corporate naming occasionally provides its own small comedy.

There is a commercial tension here. A cloud partner wants customers to use more services; customers want to avoid waste. Clear accounts make the two ambitions easier to reconcile. Spend less on an unnecessary resource, and another project may become affordable. The sensible buying question is whether the partner can demonstrate the difference between useful consumption and a quietly growing bill.

A school in the acquisition

Hanu’s consultants were called “Rockstars,” a title that makes server maintenance sound considerably louder than it usually is. Beneath the branding lay a practical idea: train people for the platform on which the business depends.

“#1 challenge for the cloud adoption is access to talent.”

Anil Singh, in Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure management playbook

The Azure Academy supplied that idea with a recruiting mechanism. A college placement notice described training and testing before the opportunity to join full time. A separate employee account described three weeks of Azure IaaS training before joining during the pandemic. The schedules differed; the recurring feature was preparation tied to actual delivery work.

Kataria’s account named Chitkara University and Chandigarh University as partners in that recruiting effort. This is what an engineering pipeline looks like before it becomes a headcount: relationships, selection, instruction and a route into work. A training academy also gives a services company somewhere to put lessons learned on customer projects. Otherwise, expertise tends to depart every evening in somebody’s backpack.

Insight made the academy explicit in its acquisition rationale. It described Hanu as having more than 500 teammates in North America and India, serving hundreds of enterprise clients. Cloud delivery capacity and the development of technical skills in India were central to the purchase. The inference is straightforward: Insight valued a mechanism for producing expertise alongside the expertise already on payroll.

What the narrow bet bought

Hanu began in 2002 with a focus on Microsoft technology. By 2012, it was offering a free cloud application assessment that asked 24 diagnostic questions. Recommendations covered suitability, deployment models and infrastructure versus platform services. The old portal is interesting as a sales philosophy: begin by deciding what the application needs, rather than treating migration as the answer to every question.

The company subsequently won Microsoft’s 2019 Azure Influencer Partner of the Year award. Gartner placed it among Niche Players in its 2021 and 2022 public cloud transformation assessments. Those are different kinds of recognition: a partner award recognizes work within an ecosystem; an analyst position describes a provider in a market. Neither replaces scrutiny of the team that will handle a particular contract.

Its 2022 offerings reached beyond moving virtual machines: application development, cloud infrastructure, data and AI, security, and healthcare solutions under HealthCloud@Hanu. The organizing principle was still Azure expertise. For a customer committed to Microsoft, that concentration could reduce the amount of explanation needed between architecture, development and operations. For a buyer seeking equal depth across several cloud platforms, the historical specialization is a reason to ask more questions.

The acquisition took effect on June 1, 2022, and was announced two days later. On December 16, Singh announced his departure. He recalled beginning in a windowless office in Princeton’s Carnegie Center and wrote about starting again. His farewell collage, full of colleagues and celebrations, offered a more human view of the business than a cloud architecture slide ever could.

The useful question after the move

Today, hanu.com redirects to Insight, and Hanu’s LinkedIn page tells visitors to follow its parent for new content. Insight’s 2024 annual report continued to describe the acquisition as an expansion of cloud capability and technical expertise in India. Hanu is best understood through that relationship, rather than as an unchanged independent vendor with a current standalone catalog.

A buyer can still copy the discipline in its history. Start with the workload, establish the whole cost, test the approach, and assign responsibility for ongoing operations. Compare a specialist with an internal team or a broader integrator according to those jobs. The cheapest migration proposal may leave the most work behind.

The conditions matter. A tightly constrained workload, a strong existing operations team or requirements favoring another platform may change the calculation. Savings from one customer cannot settle it for another. Before appointing a partner, ask who owns security, exceptions, cost reviews and the midnight incident. That question survives every fashionable term in enterprise technology. The cloud is wonderfully elastic. Responsibility should be considerably less so.