Macquarie Tel launches second IaaS offering, via subsidiary

Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 09 February 2011 09:35

When Macquarie Telecom launched its Infrastructure as a service offering last month it sought to differentiate this from the 'click-wrap' agreement, pay-by-credit card, self-service model of major overseas cloud providers. Now it has set up an arms length subsidiary to offer exactly these services.

The new company, Ninefold, kicks off today after opening its doors to beta customers in January. It has two key differentiators from the global players like Amazon: local storage and lower latency.

Prior to the launch of its IaaS offering Macquarie Telecom released a white paper highlighting the dangers posed by overseas data storage for Australian customers of services like Amazon. And, according to Ninefold CEO, Peter James, "Against a group of global competitors including Amazon we are anywhere from 750 percent to 900 percent faster across a range of apps, using a number of independent tests."

Although Ninefold is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Macquarie Telecom, James stressed that it was a quite separate entity. "We are a startup but we run at arm's length as a separately incorporated business. There are 15 of us and only one is from Macquarie Telecom'¦We are a separate brand, separate culture, separate people."

He told ExchangeDaily: "Our target market is the startups, web centric people, digital agencies and anyone who is looking for self-service, pay only for what you use cloud services.

"We have spent the last few months researching the local and overseas markets to come up what we think is a unique offering. When we did that market research people said they wanted someone who would be visible in the community, who could have longevity and the ability to scale."

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