New research sifts cloud's best from the rest

Beverley Head
Thursday, 17 February 2011 12:41

Business IT - Technology

After three months' analysis of the 115 organisations which claim to provide enterprise grade, or trusted, infrastructure cloud computing services in Australia the top seven suppliers have been named by research organisation Longhaus. The envelope please'¦

Leading the pack is IBM, followed by Fujitsu, Ultra Serve, Melbourne IT, Cloud Central, Soft Layer and Telstra. Telstra was the leading local performer according to the analysis which probed cloud vendors on a long list of issues to eventually tease out the best from the rest.

Ultra Serve was identified as a 'rising star' according to Longhaus research director Sam Higgins, who added that it had 'a business model closest to what we expected.'

Of the 115 companies originally identified as providing cloud services a shortlist of 34 of the leading players - all of which needed to have delivered more than 100 local cloud computing seats to qualify - was generated, and their responses to an extensive survey were collected and reviewed.

The rankings provided a raft of surprises - Unisys for example didn't make the top 34, although that was because it failed to clear the strict 100 seats deployed cut-off. Macquarie Telecom was well down the list in 26th slot. According to Longhaus managing director Peter Carr that was because although the organisation has a rich hosting heritage, it did not score as highly in the services based area.

CSC, Optus, NEC and Amazon took out the middle order - ranking 13-16 respectively. Amazon came in for particular attention from Longhaus, for its policy of not running a 'neighbourhood watch' scheme to keep an eye on what individual users were doing in the cloud, which could lead ultimately to performance problems for other users according to Mr Higgins.

'One of the criticisms of Amazon is they don't do that. It's a type of cheap hotel,' he said. Mr Carr said that enterprises should carefully review the business practices of cloud providers so that they could make informed choices when choosing a cloud vendor.