Virtual Ark invests heavily in cloud services

Peter Dinham
Tuesday, 06 December 2011 21:55

Australian managed services specialist, Virtual Ark, is using recently raised funding of $1.6 million to broaden the global market reach of its cloud application management platform, which is now available to companies in Australia as well as the US.

According to Virtual Ark CEO, Marty Gauvin, the company will apply proceeds from its recent 'modest capital-raising' to undertake product development that broadens the reach of its cloud management platform to work with privately owned clouds and clouds built with the OpenStack open source solution. Gauvin said the development started after completion of a proof-of-concept project which was supported by Commercialisation Australia.

Virtual Ark is one of only four companies globally recently named a Gartner Cool Vendor for Infrastructure Services, and the company is now also supplying its cloud management platform and managed services in the Australia and New Zealand market following its entry to the US market.

According to Gauvin, Australian companies were discovering that migrating services to the cloud required new skills, processes and tools. 'As customers gain some experience with cloud services (IaaS - Infrastructure-as-a-Service) from companies like Amazon, Rackspace or with internal private clouds, they soon discover that deploying and running enterprise applications on these clouds requires very different skills, processes and new tools.'

'The benefits of moving to the cloud are substantial. Our experience shows that organisations moving applications to the cloud can reduce costs anywhere from 30 per cent to 70 per cent, depending on how closely the cloud environment matches their business needs. For example, a university enrolment system might need 50 servers running full-tilt for two weeks a year, but require only two servers for the other 52 weeks of the year. That would achieve a very high cost saving from moving to the cloud.

'However, you can't simply take the old way of doing things and apply it to the cloud in the belief this will work seamlessly on the new cloud platform without creating new challenges such as security. That incorrect assumption is the most common mistake companies are making. That's where we come in,' Gauvin said.

As a virtual business, Gauvin says that Virtual Ark is undertaking software development for its cloud management platform globally, with teams located throughout Australia and on the west coast of the US.

Gauvin says the current development will make the Virtual Ark platform more scalable to meet new markets, including private cloud owners and enterprise clients. 'This is where we see a lot of demand coming from during the next four to five years.'

'We see two themes in the cloud market, which we believe will remain immature for some time. The first approach is from the enterprise, which wants to build its own cloud, thus providing it with a high level of control while still allowing it to derive some degree of benefit from the cloud.

'The other approach involves cloud 'owners' who want to take on business from their customers incrementally by building cloud services one at a time. These 'small bite' projects will deliver rapid returns and prove the efficacy of the cloud model with less risk for companies that are not willing to bet the farm on making a transition to the cloud.'