Custom DCIM, colocation client portals, capacity planning and sustainability reporting. For data centre operators, hyperscaler partners and enterprise owners who can no longer fit their facility workflow into a standard Sunbird or Schneider package.
The combination of property, energy, cooling, network fabrics and client SLAs makes a data centre a discipline of its own. Generic DCIM suites such as Sunbird, Schneider EcoStruxure IT, Vertiv Trellis, Nlyte, Cormant-CS, iTRACS and Patchmanager cover the basics, but every serious operator sooner or later hits their limits: the role model does not fit how your colocation team works, the client portal is an afterthought, and sustainability reporting comes from three systems that each have their own version of the truth.
At the same time, the demands on data centre operations are changing faster than vendors can update their roadmaps. AI workloads call for cooling models that no longer respect the classic PUE assumptions of six years ago. Edge sites want a fraction of the DCIM overhead but still need full multi-site visibility. Clients ask for scope 3 reporting that your supplier does not yet deliver off the shelf. And the EU Energy Efficiency Directive requires publication-ready energy and water use reports, whether or not your current tooling is prepared for that.
We build custom software for data centre environments where off-the-shelf tools no longer fit. Sometimes as a fully white-label colocation portal, sometimes as a layer on top of NetBox or GLPI, and sometimes as an integration platform that brings together DCIM, ITSM, ERP and facility monitoring. Always tailored to your workflow, never the other way round. Often alongside our cloud-native platform development when the stack becomes hybrid, or in tandem with our high-availability practice for mission-critical components.
The audiences we serve: colocation providers in the style of Equinix, Interxion, NorthC or EvoSwitch; enterprise data centre owners at banks, telecom companies and retailers running their own on-premises facilities; hyperscaler partners with a regional office or MSP role; carrier-neutral facilities; edge data centre operators; modular DC suppliers; data centre builders and consultancies needing custom tooling; and MSPs with multi-site data centres. Different worlds, one common thread: standard tooling forces a workflow that your customers never pay you for.
Depending on where your facility stands and which part of the operation is hitting a wall. We'll advise which direction fits during an initial conversation.
A white-label self-service portal where your colocation customers can view their rack overview, submit remote-hands tickets, request badge access and download invoices. Single sign-on against their own identity provider, role-based access per organisation and an audit log at rack level. Branded with your own identity and domain, so customers never click through to a vendor portal. Built for operators who want to demonstrate their service level in everyday touchpoints, not just in the sales meeting.
A planning and reporting layer on top of your existing DCIM or NetBox. Capacity models for rack units, kVA and cooling per zone, real-time PUE and WUE per customer, and automated reporting for the EU Energy Efficiency Directive, ISO 14001 and customer Scope 3. Includes forecasting models that link your sales pipeline to available capacity, so sold space and actual space stop drifting apart. Ideal if your current DCIM works well for asset inventory but falls short on planning and compliance.
The complete package for operators who can no longer fit their workflow into standard DCIM: asset and cable tracing, capacity, monitoring, ticketing, customer portal, billing and compliance in one coherent platform, with integrations to your ITSM, ERP and facility monitoring. Suited to multi-site operations, edge distributions and sector-specific compliance (financial DC, carrier hotel, healthcare data). Designed to preserve your operational logic, even if you consider a new DCIM vendor several years from now.
A production-ready platform running in your cloud, on-premises, or in a hybrid setup, plus everything around it so you can manage and extend it yourself.
Five situations where standard DCIM falls short and a bespoke platform, or a custom layer on top of it, becomes the more economical choice.
Your customers log in to a portal bearing your brand, not a generic Sunbird skin. Self-service onboarding, remote-hands orders and rack overviews are fully white-labelled, with a user experience that matches your service level.
Edge data centres, modular units and carrier-neutral facilities have workflows that the large DCIM packages model poorly. Custom development lets you run operators, technicians and customers according to your own logic.
Capacity sits in DCIM, tickets in ServiceNow, contracts in ERP and sensors in a separate BMS. A custom platform brings these together so you have one report, not three versions of the truth.
The EU Energy Efficiency Directive, customers' Scope 3 questions and internal ESG targets call for PUE, WUE and carbon reporting per customer and per rack. This isn't available out of the box in a standard suite, but it can be built into a bespoke reporting layer.
AI clusters disrupt the PUE assumptions of classic data centres. Direct liquid cooling, immersion and high rack densities call for capacity models that vendors have not yet built in. We model them with you.
Carrier hotels with telco requirements, financial-sector data centres subject to PCI-DSS, and healthcare data under NEN 7510 each impose additional logging, segmentation and audit requirements that standard DCIM does not cover on its own. See also ISO 27001-compliant software.
A conversation in which we establish which flows the platform needs to support — operations, customer portal, capacity, billing, compliance — and how your facility is physically organised. What is tied to a BMS, what to a DCIM, what lives in your ERP, and which processes still run on spreadsheets. For multi-site operations we visit at least two locations to understand the variation between sites.
Workshops with your operations and IT teams, plus an audit of the data sources: PDUs, CRAC units, sensors, badge system, ITSM and ERP. We establish where the source of truth lives, which integrations should be one-way or two-way, and which data must stay within your facility versus which can be sent externally. At the end: a concrete scope, an architecture choice (replace versus layer on top), a risk register and a sprint-by-sprint plan.
A working build at the end of every sprint, tested against your own sensor and ticket data, not a demo dataset. Operators and colocation customers can take part early on a staging environment, so feedback feeds straight into the next sprint. We work with feature flags so that new modules are first enabled for a single facility or customer group before rolling out more broadly.
Penetration testing by an external party, a hardening pass and mapping to ISO 27001 / EN 50600. Phased rollout per facility or per customer segment, training for key users and a short video tutorial for external colocation customers. Thereafter ongoing management for security patches, telemetry tuning and further development, depending on whether you prefer to handle this yourselves or entrust it to us.
What data centre operators usually want to know before we begin.
A thirty-minute introductory call, no obligation. Send us a rack diagram, a ticket export or simply a description of where things are hurting, and we will come to the conversation prepared and give you direction you can act on.
Appfront uses cookies and similar technologies to keep the website working properly, for analytics and for marketing. You choose what you allow. Read more in our privacy policy.
