The report says that increasing awareness of cloud computing is driving an influx of market participant such as telecommunications providers, traditional IT companies and pure-play cloud vendors. The “robust momentum” that currently characterises the Australian IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) and cloud computing market sees many organisations, from large companies to SMEs, adopting cloud solutions.

According to Frost & Sullivan’s Mayank Kapoor, most large organisations in Australia have now deployed a private cloud environment and “many are considering or have begun implementing an increasing number of mission critical workloads in the cloud.”

But Kapoor says that despite the benefits of cloud, many IT departments are still reluctant to move to the cloud, with common barriers to adoption including perceived loss of control, data sovereignty and security concerns when they move their workload and infrastructure to cloud. This concern is more common for public clouds, and is one of the reasons why many of the public cloud deployments in Australia are predominantly non-mission critical in nature.”

Frost & Sullivan reports that the “pure play” IaaS vendors are primarily global players and first movers such as Amazon and Rackspace, with recent entrants in the local IaaS market such as OrionVM, Cloud Central, Zetta Grid and UltraServe, also being successful.

{loadposition graeme}

“Telecommunications providers are actively moving into the cloud space and have a strategic advantage, because they can leverage their strong network capabilities through their underlying network. They can also offer private and public cloud offerings bundled with carrier services, says Frost’s Phil Harpur. “Telstra, Optus, Macquarie Telecom and AAPT have already embarked on cloud offerings as part of their strategic direction.

“A fast growing category is the Managed Service Providers (MSPs) in the IaaS space. Companies like Dimension Data, IBM, Fujitsu, HP, and local providers such as Brennan IT, Harbour IT and Melbourne IT are all expanding offerings in the cloud computing,” says Harpur. “Vendors in the IaaS market with a local data centre presence will have an edge over other players. We are witnessing many of the local IaaS players starting to establish or expand their local data presence in Australia.”

Frost & Sullivan cites one of the key benefits of using cloud-based IaaS solutions as the significant upfront savings that can be achieved, in terms of hardware and also associated maintenance costs, with the cloud model eliminating much upfront capital outlay.

“IaaS is rapidly becoming the delivery model of choice for companies looking at greenfield, test and development type of deployments or hosting applications in the cloud,” says Harpur. “With such low barriers to entry, the commercial case for any business of any size to adopt IaaS solutions is strong.”

The idea behind Amazon Glacier is to provide a separate tier of cloud storage at low cost for backup and archiving purposes.

Pricing starts at $US0.01 per gigabyte per month ($US0.0012 at Amazon's Asia Pacific data centre in Tokyo), but data transfer charges are levied on data leaving the centre (starting at $US0.201 per gigabyte after the first 10GB).

There is a small fee for upload and retrieval requests ($US0.06 per thousand requests),and if more than 5% of the average monthly storage is retrieved, a further retrieval fee is applied, starting at $US0.012 per gigabyte.

Reflecting the intention that Glacier is used for backup and archiving, a surcharge of $US0.036 per gigabyte is applied for items deleted within 90 days.

So like other Amazon Cloud Services, Glacier is true 'pay only for what you use' cloud archival storage.

Security is provided via Amazon's Identity and Access Management service, and the service has been designed to provide average annual durability of 99.999999999% for each item stored through the use of automatic replication and integrity checks.

{loadposition stephen08}The company plans to introduce a feature to support the automatic movement of data between Amazon S3 and Glacier according to data lifecycle policies (there is already no charge for moving data between S3 and Glacier within the same AWS region).

Amazon officials suggest Glacier is suitable for a variety of applications, including the archiving of enterprise information, media assets (eg, TV news footage), and scientific data.

CONTINUED

---

It is also said to be relevant to digital preservation efforts, as it allows projects to start small at low cost and then scale up to massive collections, while automatically providing data integrity checks and performing automatic repairs if errors are detected.

"An organisation like ours thinks in centuries when it comes to content retention, and long term preservation of our Master Archives is a critical part our mission here at NYPR," said Steve Shultis, CTO of New York Public Radio.

"Storing these core assets on traditional media such as local disk and off-site tape exposes us to corruption and even outright-loss of data.

"We are excited to move our archives to Amazon Glacier, which will be a better long-term solution."

Alyssa Henry, vice president of AWS Storage Services, said "Today, most businesses rely on expensive, brittle, and inflexible tape for their archiving solution.

{loadposition stephen08}"This approach requires expensive upfront payments, is difficult to operate and maintain, and leads to wasted capacity and money.

"Amazon Glacier changes the game for companies requiring archiving and backup solutions because you pay nothing upfront, pay a very low price for storage, are able to scale up and down whenever needed, and AWS handles all of the operational heavy lifting required to do data retention well."

Mike Foster, Fujitsu’s ceo who is currently visiting Western Australia, said that there was a strong business case for a WA based cloud – partly to meet the needs of clients in that state, but also to step up business continuity capability. Mr Foster said that if the business case stacked up, there was no reason why more instances of Fujitsu’s local cloud might not be launched in the future.

He said that having a second cloud instance in Australia was increasingly important to existing users. Mr Foster said that a manufacturing and transportation business using cloud services delivered out of Fujitsu’s two Sydney data centres had specified that it wanted disaster recovery capabilities located at least 500 km away from the primary cloud site in order to reduce risk.

According to Fujitsu the new instance of the cloud should also address Western Australia customer concerns regarding latency for applications which would otherwise be run out of an Eastern Seaboard data centre.

For most organisations however latency issues across the Nullarbor aren’t really that much of a problem.

{loadposition bev}In 2010 Perth based Curtin University announced that it had deliberately selected an Optus cloud service based in a data centre in NSW in order to explore the issues associated with latency and bandwidth. It turned out to be not much of an issue at all.

Earlier this week Ninefold, a cloud storage provider owned by Sydney based Macquarie Telecom, also announced that it was extending its programme of making storage available for free to start-ups based in the Eastern States to WA.

Mr Foster said that although Fujitsu itself did not think latency had been a major problem, there had been a customer perception that it was. “Early on we missed out on a couple of deals because of the issue of latency,” he told iTWire.

---

Improved communications networks increasingly meant latency was less of an issue he said. “Cloud is absolutely dependent on having a good robust network.

“Gas and mining – their core requirements are in more diverse locations. Having good high speed communications is essential to the cloud,” said Mr Foster, adding that the national broadband network would further benefit cloud users.

What is possibly more enticing – particularly for WA Government agencies - than a latency trim is the prospect of being able to store data in a locally based cloud. Under the recordkeeping legislation of most states it is technically illegal for government agencies to store records outside of the home state.

While workarounds have been created in some jurisdictions, the fact that WA Government users will be able to point to their data still being held in the state will probably give some comfort to cloud sceptics. Mr Foster said that Government clients were one of the target markets for the new cloud instance.

{loadposition bev}“The reason our local cloud is successful is that organisations want to use the cloud’s elasticity but they want to know where their data is. We’ve sold that hard,” he said.

Fujitsu’s WA cloud service should be operational by November.

The rate of growth is impressive, with more than one million people using join.me for the first time each week, company officials claimed.

"In 2012, join.me has become LogMeIn's fastest growing product, both in terms of new users and new sales, and we believe it's now among the fastest growing collaboration products on the market," said Lou Orfanos, LogMeIn's director of collaboration products.

"As join.me grows to serve millions of users and their broadening needs, we will continue to invest in delivering powerful features while maintaining a simple yet elegant experience, a core philosophy we believe will continue to drive rapid, viral user adoption."

{loadposition stephen08}Recent changes to the service include the addition of a window sharing feature to the pro version.

Screen sharing is a core component of the free service, but window sharing has the advantage of keeping focus on the intended content and avoiding interruptions caused by other applications that happen to be running on the presenter's computer.

Other features of the pro version (which costs $US19 per month or $US149 per year) include premium audio conferencing lines, presenter swapping options, private meeting rooms, custom meeting links, and administrative control for teams.

Also relatively new is the free join.me app for Windows 8 PCs, phones and tablets (illustrated above).

The app takes advantage of the 'UI formerly known as Metro' but now officially named 'Windows 8 UI' and works with the free and pro version so join.me.

The midrange Dell Wyse D series is intended for use with virtualised desktop systems from Citrix, Dell, Microsoft and VMware.

Based on the hardware as the high-end Z series, it is said to outperform the equivalent HP product on graphics benchmarks.

A range of options are available for enhanced multimedia support. Connectivity includes Gigabit Ethernet, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.

{loadposition stephen08}The D series comprises the D90D7 (with Windows Embedded Standard 7), D90DW (with Windows Embedded Standard 2009), D50D (with a Dell Wyse enhanced version of SUSE Linux Enterprise), and the D00D (a full-featured but centrally managed 'cloud PC').

"The Dell Wyse D class mid-range cloud client family provides new levels of desktop performance in an extremely efficient, compact form factor, as well as extends Dell's cloud client computing offering to better serve the customer needs," said Param Desai, executive director of product management at Dell Wyse.

"The D class offers businesses the efficiency, flexibility and ease of integration they require, while end users enjoy a rich, high-performance multimedia desktop experience."

The D90D7 can be ordered immediately, with prices starting at $670. Other models will go on sale "in the near future".

Reckon BankData - initially available only in conjunction with CashBook Online - can receive transaction details from Commonwealth Bank, Westpac, NAB, ANZ, St George, Bank of Melbourne and BankSA in Australia, plus ANZ, Westpac, ASB Bank, Kiwibank and National Bank in New Zealand.

It also works with the Yodlee service to import data from "thousands of banks throughout the world."

The service includes a system for automatically classifying transactions and splitting amounts across multiple categories.

{loadposition stephen08}Reckon officials said the company plans to offer BankData as an adjunct to Quicken Personal Plus, Quicken Home & Business, and QuickBooks (desktop and hosted).

"With Reckon BankData, unlike some existing products, both the accounting professional and their small business client are using the same tool," said group marketing manager Gerald Chait.

"Being a cloud accounting application they are able to access the same data simultaneously and make collaborative business decisions."

A broadly similar service is offered by BankLink Australia, and MYOB's LiveAccounts cloud accounting service collects transaction feeds for more than 100 banks and financial institutions.

Dimensional is using the Floktu cloud-based software to facilitate seminars, webinars and other educational events it stages for clients each year and according to Dimensional’s Australian head of Communications, Jim Parker, the company considers the seminars, webinars and other educational events it holds as strategically important to its differentiation in a very competitive market.

Parker said that traditionally, Dimensional, like many firms in the wholesale investment market, used faxes, spread sheets, pdf and other manually operated and time consuming methods of events and conference management tools.

The use of the Floktu event management system is the first of its kind in the global Dimensional organisation and, according to Parker, has led to immediate improvements in productivity and client intimacy.

{loadposition peter}“We needed a solution that really gave us an efficient and professional interface. Floktu has seriously improved our conference registration and information process. In turn, that’s allowed us to put more energy into face-to-face communication where we can add greater value.”

Parker says a key element of Dimensional’s market differentiation is its emphasis on providing its client base with insights on academic theory and investment practice.

 “We don’t deal directly with the public, but we have strong ties with our institutional and adviser clients. A lot of what we do with clients is around education and conferencing.”

According to Parker, Dimensional holds a range of events for its clients, including up to five major events per year for new clients, at least two similar events per year for ongoing clients, and increasingly, webinars and other workshop style events.

“Using Floktu, hundreds of clients are now able to get access to key information and to communicate with Dimensional far more seamlessly,” Parker said, adding that the cloud based software platform for Dimensional “set it apart” from its competitors.

Keryl Aylin, events manager at Dimensional, said the Floktu solution had doubled productivity in events management. “It has basically allowed us to free up half the time of one member of our events management team. The Floktu solution is versatile, it allows us to have control and it reinforces our brand in the market as an innovator but also as a trusted investment firm. We have done about 13 conferences so far with Floktu in a very short time and we intend to do more.”

According to Floktu CEO, Jeremy de Constantin, it is increasingly apparent that cloud based, highly secure events management software can make a “real difference in the way organisations like Dimensional serve their demanding client base.”

“Productivity gains for enterprises using Floktu are very real and we are proud that the solutions are built and developed in Australia.”

UltraServe's Cloud Machines service allows customers to choose between pure pay-as-you-go billing based on the amount of resources (CPU, memory, data and disk space) consumed, or prepayment in return for discounted rates.

Those discounts start at 7% for a modest $200 prepayment, and range up to 20% on $20,000.

Company officials claim the service provides a high performance, scalable platform for organisations seeking to reduce capital and operational expenses, and UltraServe offers a $2500 service credit to customers that have been in business for less than six months.

{loadposition stephen08}Customers can manage their virtual infrastructure via a web portal or an API.

"Our customers are all dealing with a dynamic and fast moving competitive market, and they need to respond quickly with elasticity to match demand. This is exactly who we're catering for with the Cloud Machines," said founder Samuel Yeats.

"Working with customers that are looking for a hybrid approach to their managed hosting, this new service offering allows us to cater for all requirements."

In an interview with iTWire from the company’s offices in India, Infosys Senior Vice President and Global Head of Business, Chandrashekar Kakal (pictured), said the risk of problems like those that had previously occurred in the banking system here in Australia, or with other systems in large enterprises around the world, could be “significantly reduced” with the deployment of end-to-end infrastructure testing like that launched globally today by Infosys.

“There is no 100% guarantee, but risks to businesses and enterprise are minimised and significantly reduced with infrastructure testing. It is not left to chance,” Kakal stressed.

Kakal makes the point that infrastructure testing is important for companies consolidating infrastructure in data centres, particularly as they move into the cloud.

{loadposition peter}Kakal cites various industry estimates that the cost of date centre downtime can range between $80,000 and $500,000 an hour for large enterprises and he says infrastructure testing from Infosys will “significantly help reduce downtime and resulting costs.”

He cites IDC on the need for infrastructure testing, specifically its Director, Application Development, Testing and Management Services, Rona Shuchat, who comments that “as enterprises are challenged by deployment of increasingly diverse technologies including virtualisation, collaboration and cloud, there is a growing urgency to validate, streamline and optimise underlying infrastructure being transformed with the data centres.”

In a further comment, Shuchat says that end-to-end infrastructure testing services with related program governance, risk assessment, configuration, security, interface and performance testing will “help enterprises scale up to meet the multi-dimensional complexity of their growing infrastructure and application portfolios.”

Infosys’ new offering comprises a range of services spanning the entire infrastructure life cycle, from new hardware deployment and integration to migration and operations, and Kakal describes infrastructrure testing as an “innovation at the intersection of two of our core offerings – infrastructure management and testing.”

“This is an excellent example of how we are innovating across services to help our clients drive greater infrastructure reliability. We are already seeing a positive response from many clients for this offering and have also started assisting several organisations across geographies and industries."

SAP announced yesterday that its Business ByDesign SaaS ERP solution was selected by the NSW government’s Trade and Investment department, which it says is its first cloud platform win in the public sector in Australia. SAP was awarded the contract after a public tender process.

The state government’s decision to put its faith in the cloud drew praise from Ovum’s Research Director IT Asia/Pacific, Dr Steve Hodgkinson, who said that NSW Trade & Investment was to be “admired for embracing a new model for public sector ICT procurement.”

“This will be an interesting project to watch because it is charting new territory in government use of cloud services in Australia.

{loadposition peter}“The hope is that the multi-tenant architecture and configurability of the SaaS solution will enable the many agencies within the Trade & Investment portfolio to use it as an efficient and flexible shared service. If this hope is realised it will be an important proof point for the efficacy of the cloud services model as an alternative to more traditional in-house shared ICT services arrangements.”

Dr Hodgkinson said SAP had stated that the project was its largest SAP Business ByDesign win globally to date, as well as its first cloud platform win in the Australian public sector.  

“Many eyes, therefore, will be on this project and SAP will need to put its best foot forward. Cloud sceptics will be eager to see it fail. Cloud proponents, on the other hand, will be keen to see both SAP and the agency succeed in taking a major step into the future of public sector ICT-enabled innovation.”

According to Dr Hodgkinson, the timing of the NSW Government project and the decision to deploy in the cloud was good for three reasons.    

“Firstly, the benefits and risks of the cloud model are becoming better understood – and the department has gone into this project with a pragmatic, strategic, approach and with its ‘eyes open’. Secondly, the maturity of cloud services is evolving rapidly, particularly with regard to the management of the data sovereignty, record keeping and security requirements necessary to obtain the trust of risk-averse government executives and procurement officers.

“Thirdly, the crisis of confidence in the ICT capabilities of agencies, particularly in a shared services context, shows no sign of improving. Recent budget cuts mean that it is now difficult for agency executives to pretend that either the ICT status quo or traditional under-invested in-house approaches to application consolidation and sharing are sustainable.”

Despite what he describes as the “crisis of confidence” in the ICT capabilities of government agencies, Dr Hodgkinson says that, in contrasts, confidence in cloud services is growing rapidly.

“The promise that cloud services might actually be better, faster, less expensive and less risky than previous ICT projects (as was demonstrated in the recently published Ovum report Practical Steps to the Cloud for Government Agencies) is an attractive and timely proposition. The eyes of agency executives in all jurisdictions, as well as throughout the ICT industry, will be on this project.”