Ninefold's bullish on Aussie cloud offering

Stephen Withers
Thursday, 27 October 2011 12:21

 

It's widely thought that you have to go offshore to get competitively priced cloud services. Ninefold says that ain't so.

 

Ninefold is an Australian company that offers onshore cloud compute and storage storage at prices that compete with large offshore providers. "We are competitive head-to-head with Amazon" for compute and storage, managing director Peter James told iTWire.

 

"We're real cloud," said Mr James, as Ninefold offers self-service, instant provisioning, and true utility-model charging. "Our pricing is quite granular and very visible," he said, and added that Ninefold is planning to offer bundled pricing for customers that prefer certainty to paying for exactly what they use.

He conceded that connectivity costs were an issue, but suggested that reduced latency and local support compensates for that. Since the company is backed by Macquarie Telecom it can deliver high performance and low latency.

On the cloud storage side, Mr James said Ninefold was the only cloud storage provider in Australia. The company uses an EMC Atmos system, which was designed for storage-as-a-service.

He predicts storage will be the hot issue around cloud computing next year. "Most people don't know what it is, but it's the fastest growing segment," he said, noting that analysts are predicting cloud storage will soon be a bigger market than compute services.

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