Macquarie offshoot launches "Aussie Dropbox"

Beverley Head
Monday, 27 February 2012 13:29

Ninefold, the cloud storage offshoot of Macquarie Telecom has unveiled Business Cloud Drive - designed as a local alternative to services such as Dropbox, with the key difference being that all data will be stored in Australia.

Speaking at Kickstart on the Gold Coast, Peter James, Ninefold managing director said that the system was intended to support collaboration in the cloud, and also restore a level of control to companies grappling with the rising tide of consumer owned technology entering the workplace. Without a mechanism for centrally storing and accessing data on those devices companies felt they were 'losing control' of their data and intellectual property, said Mr James.

Ninefold has negotiated a deal with US based Oxygen Cloud, which will see the Oxygen cloud platform sit on a data centre in Australia, and be used to manage data stored in Ninefold's cloud.

Initially targeted at medium businesses with 100 plus seats, Mr James said that a consumer version of the system was also in the pipeline.

For $12,000 a year, plus $5,000 set up costs, users of the system will have access to 100 seat licence. They will then have to pay $92 per terabyte per month stored in Ninefold's storage cloud.

A 250 seat licence is available for $24,000 a year, plus costs.

At time of writing no pricing details are available on the small business and consumer version of the system, although Mr James said that was likely to be released within a month.