FME Flow Hosted - Managed Service Provider

This service is at the core of our operational support, representing a complete lifecycle management service for our client's production data integration platform. We ensure it's always-on and listening for jobs, secure, performant, trouble-free and aligned with the client's business needs. Our detailed responsibilities within this managed service include:

Test and Trial Environments. We provision test and trial FME Flow Hosted environments. This type of environment can serve as a review of the functionality of a new component of FME Flow, or to test a particular workflow without impacting a production environment. We also find it's a rapid and IT friction-free way of allowing our clients to evaluate FME Flow for their own private cloud, or local on-premise deployment!

Proactive Instance Management. We handle all day-to-day operations of the FME Flow Hosted instance. This includes initial launch and careful configuration, ongoing disk and instance size management to precisely match workload demands and consultative advice on the most cost-effective pricing models. We perform detailed analysis of our client’s usage patterns to recommend whether pay-as-you-go or an annual plan offers better value, ensuring costs are optimised. Our proactive monitoring extends beyond simple uptime; we track CPU utilisation, RAM consumption, disk I/O and job queue lengths to anticipate performance bottlenecks before they occur.

Robust Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity. We recognise that for our client, their FME workflows are mission-critical. Our managed service is underpinned by a robust and tested disaster recovery plan. This leverages the native FME Flow Hosted snapshot and backup functionality, which we've configured for automated backups. These incremental backups are securely stored on Amazon S3's highly resilient infrastructure. This process ensures we can provide our clients with the peace of mind that their valuable intellectual property, their automated workflows and their data are secure and recoverable with minimal disruption.

Commercial & Cost Governance. We provide active cost governance to ensure the service delivers maximum value. This includes ongoing analysis and optimisation for pay-as-you-go clients. We actively monitor the included storage, transfer and caps on their plans to prevent unexpected costs and configure proactive budget alerts to ensure costs always remain within expected parameters.

Comprehensive Security Management. We operate a layered security strategy. This begins with prompt application of all security patches and updates, diligent port management and the configuration of highly specific instance notifications to alert our team of any anomalous or potentially malicious activity. Our role extends to advising the client’s team on security best practices for their FME workspaces, such as the secure management of database credentials and API keys.

Uptime and Performance Management. Our commitment to uptime is central to our service. We understand that downtime for the client directly translates as a risk to their service delivery and reputation. We've configured a comprehensive set of instance notifications that feed into our own monitoring and incident response tools. This allows us to identify and react to any performance degradation, or potential failure at speed. Our goal is to resolve issues proactively, often before the client is aware of a potential problem. This forms a key part of our first-line support, provided under the Managed Service.

Managed FME Flow Hosted Upgrades. The FME Platform evolves rapidly, it has to, because the data ecosystem we all work in is moving at pace! As a result, new releases of FME offering powerful new functionality and security enhancements mean we need to react. We manage the entire upgrade process for our clients. This is a carefully orchestrated procedure that includes pre-upgrade testing in a staging environment, clear communication, scheduling the upgrade during a low-impact window, a dual run period and comprehensive post-upgrade support to ensure a seamless transition. This managed process means the client benefits from the latest FME innovations without incurring any of the associated operational risk or workload.

FME Software Provisioning and Licence Management. At Avineon Tensing we provide licensing for the whole of the FME Platform inclusive of FME Form, FME Flow and FME Realize, not just FME FLow Hosted. As a Safe Software Value Added Reseller (VAR) we are a single point of contact for our FME client's data integration needs. This enables our clients to benefit from our expert advice in supporting the authoring and automation needed to go hand in hand with their enterprise deployment of FME Flow Hosted. We ensure they have the optimal number of licences for their user base, ensuring a cost effective process authoring capability. By managing their desktop licences alongside their cloud platform, we provide a unified support and management experience for their entire FME investment, eliminating the potential for fragmented support or user friction.

We firmly believe that the value of a powerful platform is only realised through the skill of its users. Our service to our clients extends beyond the classroom to encompass the people who use it, against their own data and platform. Our standard, classroom-based training goes a long way to get users up and running but when it comes to enterprise data integration deployments we typically have to provide highly targeted mentoring for specific individuals, focusing on their unique project challenges. We deliver intensive, one-on-one expert coaching sessions for FME Flow and FME Flow Hosted. These sessions are designed to help technical leads or administrators master advanced FME techniques, troubleshoot complex workflows, and learn best practices for building efficient and maintainable data integration processes that will go into production. Our flexible, responsive and personalised approach to training ensures our clients are not just using the platform, but are continuously extracting maximum value from it.

The quality of our training matters to us; a lot. It’s why our FME Trainers and coaches will always be Certified with Safe. It’s also why our trainers have all delivered training for over 10 years each. It’s because we believe in the power of a story, we set data examples in the context of the real-world, something our trainer has experienced. We train technique, but we also want you to learn from our experience. You also won’t catch our trainers delivering a script; we certainly follow an agenda, but we want the flexibility to customise every course to the delegates that attend.

Specialist Resource Identification

To deliver our MSP service to our clients we have the following roles and capabilities within our UK team:

Director of Service Delivery

• Responsible for service delivery, design auditing, SLAs and reporting, risk and issue management, change control and continuous improvement.
• Responsible for cost management and credit draw-down where applicable.
• The Director of Delivery is the client’s single point of contact for governance and ensures we meet auditability standards.

FME Flow Certified Professionals & Trainers

• These are the primary platform engineers and data automation specialists responsible for the hosted instance management. This support role includes deployment, scheduling on-time, job debugging, performance tuning and governance.
• Backups and snapshots and security management.
• Coordinates major incidents, drives root cause analysis and corrective actions and maintains incident runbooks aligned to Flow Hosted capabilities.
• These specialists ensure the client’s technical staff are confident and effective in authoring and maintaining Workspaces and that guidance is embedded in the client's way of working.

Data Integration Project Manager

• Acts as the operational lead for the delivery of large data integration services, ensuring alignment between our client's business objectives and the technical execution of FME Flow Hosted solutions. Often this is for projects where a managed platform service is a smaller component of a much broader project.
• Oversees the coordination of workflow deployments and integration milestones, ensuring timely delivery and adherence to agreed service levels.
• Manages stakeholder communications, translating technical progress into business impact and ensuring our client is informed and engaged throughout the lifecycle of each initiative.
• Supports change control processes, risk and issue tracking and continuous improvement activities, working closely with the Director of Service Delivery to maintain governance and auditability.
• Collaborates with FME Flow Certified Professionals to prioritise and schedule platform operations, including job orchestration, performance tuning, and incident resolution.
• Provides strategic input into upgrade planning, data architecture decisions, and capacity forecasting, ensuring the platform remains scalable and future-ready.

At the inception of a managed service we collaborate to design a robust and production-ready FME Flow Hosted environment. The process is typically structured into four key phases:

• Virtual Discovery and Strategic Planning – Avineon Tensing conducts a remote workshop with the client's stakeholders to gather requirements, analyse processing demand volume, frequency and along with the data source and targets. We produce a comprehensive deployment recommendation detailing instance sizing, security, backup policies, engine availability and region deployment.
• Platform Provisioning and Technical Setup – We provision the FME Flow Hosted instance in the appropriate AWS region. Configuring security groups, network access, monitoring rules and integrate the instance with our MSP Dashboard. We support our clients through screen-sharing sessions to establish secure data connectivity and migrate any existing workspaces.
• Data and Platform Management Implementation - We deliver governance workshops to define workspace standards when moving processes to FME Flow into production. Best practices for schedule management and workflow promotion from development to production are established, with all discussions managed remotely with online coaching from certified platform staff.
• Virtual Onboarding, Go-Live, and Service Transition - We conduct onboarding sessions to familiarise the client's users with the platform and support procedures and coordinate a go-live event. We typically follow this with a two-week hypercare period with dedicated monitoring and instant support via direct communication.

Resource Management

Our resource management model for a client's Managed Service is a fully remote service delivery model. We established a clear communication framework from day one. All formal support requests are channelled through our technical support service desk, creating a single, auditable point of entry. For more collaborative discussions and rapid-response communication we use Microsoft Teams. Strategic reviews, roadmap sessions and service reports are delivered this way.

The FME Flow Hosted Dashboard is accessible over the web through multi-factor authentication, it’s the primary interface for oversight and management. This is a secure, fully logged and audited solution ensuring that every action taken by our team is transparent and traceable. We will only access the actual FME Flow Hosted instance with permission or whilst chaperoned, in order to trace an issue. All other actions to manage the instance are completed through our dedicated management console.

Our sister company in the Netherlands is also a Safe Software MSP, with a dedicated Managed Services team of over 20 FME Flow Certified Professionals. As an extra level of reassurance, they can support our UK team as required.

We have proven that even personalised, high-touch services like training and coaching can be delivered effectively in a remote model. Ad-hoc training for new staff and one-on-one coaching sessions have been conducted with the client either over MS Teams or via our virtual training environment. This hosted solution provides a training virtual machine that enables candidates to learn the FME Platform without risk of interfering with any of their own IT infrastructure.

Managed Service Levels

Our managed service levels fall under our standard technical support terms, unless otherwise agreed with our client as part of a dedicated SLA arrangement. Standard service hours are weekdays 09:00 – 17:30 UK; extended hours/weekend by agreement (for example to support out of hour upgrades or security patching).

At Avineon Tensing we pride ourselves on being our client’s Data Sherpa and Trusted Advisor. We therefore endeavour to support our clients to the best of our ability, working closely with our partner Safe Software.

• Software Issues: Avineon Tensing diligently pursues resolutions for serious software issues, actively seeking workarounds and consistently communicating with the client.
• Third-Party Software Issues: In cases requiring changes to Third-Party software such as Safe Software’s FME, Avineon Tensing logs the fault with the vendor, relaying client priorities.
• Non-replicable or Troublesome Issues: For non-replicable or challenging issues, Avineon Tensing engages the vendor for assistance and works closely with the client to identify a satisfactory workaround.
• Vendor Location Consideration: Resolution times in our ‘priority categories’ can be adjusted for vendors outside of Europe, such as Canada due to the differing time zones.
• Priority Revision: Avineon Tensing may revise priorities based on call details or workaround availability, with transparent communication to the client.

Technical Support Desk

To ensure a structured, transparent and fully accountable support experience for our clients, all service requests, incidents and queries are managed through our centralised service desk platform, Zoho Support. This system provides our clients with a dedicated single point of contact, allowing them to raise support tickets via a secure web portal or a designated support email address. Upon submission, each ticket is assigned a unique reference number, providing immediate acknowledgement and ensuring that no request is ever lost or overlooked. Internally, Zoho Support acts as the command centre for our FME support team. The platform facilitates a rigorous triage process where each ticket is categorised, prioritised according to pre-defined service levels, and assigned to the most appropriate FME Certified Professional.

The system automates the tracking of response and resolution times against the specific SLAs defined in our client agreements, providing our management team with real-time performance oversight. All communication, diagnostic notes and resolution steps are logged within the ticket, creating an auditable history of each interaction. This provides transparency to our clients, who can monitor the status of their requests and review the communication history at any time.

MSP Platform Event Alerts

A range of alerts have been created within the platform that when triggered send messages to the allocated team members with defined escalation routes. This is a key way to ensure proactive monitoring of the environment.

Managed Service Continuous Improvement

Avineon Tensing’s Managed Service for our clients is underpinned by a robust framework for continuous improvement, ensuring the service evolves in line with operational needs, platform developments and user feedback. This is not a static support model; it’s a dynamic partnership built on data-led insights, strategic engagement and a shared commitment to excellence. Key mechanisms driving continuous improvement include:

• Operational Analytics - We review performance metrics and log files, errors, and throughput across the FME Flow Hosted environment, our support team analyses patterns to identify recurring issues. This enables data-led prioritisation of enhancements and proactive problem management.

• Upgrade Readiness - We continuously evaluate new FME features and prototype them before adoption, ensuring our clients benefits from platform enhancements as soon as they are stable and valuable.
• Training and Coaching - Targeted sessions are delivered in response to live issues and aligned with design standards. These improve authoring quality and reduce incidents, empowering the client's technical staff to work confidently and independently.
• Backlog Management and Strategic Reviews - Improvements are jointly prioritised and tracked to completion, ensuring accountability and momentum. Scheduled catch-ups with the client are not just status updates; they are strategic reviews covering SLA adherence, platform performance, future project pipeline and upcoming FME capabilities.
• Community Engagement and Learning Initiatives - The client is invited to participate in our annual face-to-face FME Tour events, UK-wide roadshows showcasing the latest platform features and industry use cases. These sessions foster innovation and keep their team at the forefront of data integration trends.
• Skill Booster Workshops - We offer no-cost, live technical workshops focused on specific FME topics. These sessions provide practical, hands-on learning without requiring a formal training budget, helping the client solve real-world problems and deepen their technical proficiency.

This multi-layered approach ensures Avineon Tensing's clients are not only supported but continuously informed, skilled and positioned to extract maximum value from their FME investment.

When alerts are triggered, our data engineers conduct structured investigations, including root cause analysis and performance profiling. For several clients, this has led to improvements such as streamlining data transformations, reducing duplication and adopting more modern processing techniques. As data volumes and content evolve, our monitoring ensures that static processes are regularly reviewed and optimised to maintain efficiency. Rather than defaulting to platform upgrades, we avoid “throwing hardware at the problem”, as this can be a costly and often unnecessary solution. Instead, we prioritise process refinement first, using a methodology that mirrors the Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) cycle. This structured approach enables us to deliver continuous improvement in a controlled and collaborative manner.

• Plan: We analyse alerts and performance data to identify bottlenecks or inefficiencies, working closely with the client to understand operational goals.
• Do: Targeted enhancements are implemented, such as workflow restructuring or resource reallocation. We may also adjust monitoring and alerting thresholds as part of this.
• Study: We assess the impact of changes against performance benchmarks, evaluating improvements in processing time, resource usage, and system stability.
• Act: Successful changes are adopted into the standard configuration, or further refined based on feedback and performance data.

This cyclical model ensures that improvements are data-driven, measurable, and aligned with the client's strategic objectives. It also allows us to maintain a lean hosting footprint for our client, keeping their costs efficient and avoiding unnecessary infrastructure scaling unless genuinely required to support increased throughput. Our Managed Service is delivered remotely, using secure access protocols and monitoring tools. This enables rapid response and continuous oversight without the need for on-site presence. SLAs for our clients are tailored to their needs and typically include guaranteed response times, uptime targets and scheduled reporting.

Continuous improvement is embedded in our service ethos. When included in a managed service we conduct quarterly service reviews with our clients to assess performance trends, discuss upcoming data initiatives and identify further optimisation opportunities. These reviews foster transparency and ensure the service evolves in line with the client’s operational and strategic priorities.

Efficiency is embedded into every layer of the Managed Service, from platform architecture to cost governance. Avineon Tensing ensures that the client’s FME Flow Hosted environment operates at peak performance, with predictable spend and minimal operational friction.

Key optimisation strategies include:

• Performance Tuning - We provide advice and support to optimise workspaces through parallelisation, batching, streaming, and transformer refinement. This results in shorter processing windows and fewer bottlenecks, improving overall throughput.
• Cost Governance - Through instance resizing, engine strategies, and data cap monitoring, we help the client maintain predictable spend and avoid unexpected charges outside of their agreement. Our MSP dashboard provides real-time visibility into instance stability and resource usage.
• Security and Patch Management - We ensure rapid response to critical security patches as identified by Safe Software, alongside locked-down ports, role-based access, and credential governance, maintaining a secure and compliant environment.
• Uptime Management - Proactive monitoring, incident response, and scheduled maintenance windows are all part of our uptime strategy. These are supported by detailed reporting and runbook-driven incident handling.
• Platform Oversight - The FME MSP Dashboard enables continuous operational analysis, allowing us to quickly assess instance health and performance trends. This ensures the platform remains stable, scalable, and responsive to the client's evolving needs.

Our close partnership with Safe Software, recognised through our acknowledgement in their 2025 Excellence Awards, ensures we remain at the cutting edge of FME technology. As the only UK company to receive this recognition, Avineon Tensing is uniquely positioned to deliver innovative, efficient, and future-ready data integration services to our client.

Is your organisation looking to adopt FME Flow Hosted - the FME PaaS solution, if you would like to run through your particular needs, get in touch.