Although IBM has offered a local cloud solution in the past, it has been a “legacy” service, according to IBM’s cloud engagement and strategy executive Simon Kaye. That Virtual Server Services offering will still be marketed, but as a “landing platform” for companies seeking to transition to the cloud he said.
The locally hosted SCE+ service is IBM’s “First enterprise graded production system,” according to Mr Kaye. Users will be billed by the month based on consumption and can provision Wintel, Linux and Unix platforms.
In January next year Mr Kaye said that the SCE+ platform would be used to deliver SAP as a Service for Australian organisations which wanted to keep their data local. He said SAP as a service was already offered out of IBM clouds based in the UK and US.
Mr Kaye said that having a local instance of the SCE+ service had been the “missing puzzle piece to round out the portfolio.”
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The SCE+ instance of the cloud, which is being hosted as a secure multi-tenanted cloud out of IBM’s Baulkham Hills data centre, is IBM’s seventh cloud centre, and is intended to act as an Asia Pacific hub for SCE+.
Gartner analyst Rolf Jester said that; “Clearly in the local context it gives a bit of competition. IBM is one of the leading players in the whole of the IT space – not just in services – and this says we now have a credible offering.”
He said that as an “enterprise premium product” it would complement the cloud services that had been on offer from IBM out of its Singapore data centre.
Mr Jester said that although Infrastructure as a Service was still a relatively small part of the overall market it was growing fast. This year IaaS will generate $239 million, but is growing at 53 per cent a year.
He said Gartner’s forecast was that IaaS would grow to a $1.1 billion market by 2016.
