Melbourne IT looks to Asia for Cloud export sales

James Riley
Wednesday, 02 September 2009 05:08

IT Industry - Market

Hosting powerhouse Melbourne IT has started selling pay-as-you-go, enterprise-class cloud services to SMEs as one of just six companies worldwide selected as resellers for the vCloud Express software from global virtualisation specialist VMware.

And the company aims to start selling its cloud offering as an export service to Asian markets, Melbourne IT chief technology officer Glenn Gore told iTWire.

The vCloud Express tie-up cements Melbourne IT’s special relationship with VMware. The company had already become the first company in the world last April to go live with the VMware vSphere 4 virtual platform. It has become VMware’s partner of choice for the region.

Mr Gore said the new vCloud Express service went earlier today, with an initial private beta period expected to last a couple of weeks before broader public beta trials begin.

In an exclusive interview with iTWire, Mr Gore said the company expected to win potential cloud customers who would otherwise have been forced to look at overseas offerings like Amazon or Google.

He said there were potential legions of customers in Australia who would have looked to cloud computing services, but were put off by the perceived risk of having their data hosted outside the country.

The initial target for the Melbourne IT vCloud Express service would be in the test and development market.

“It will be for web developers and software developers. Initially in driving the beta, we’re not really interested in seeing production software running on it, because there will be some tweaks,” Gore said.

CONTINUED Page 2