Melbourne IT looks to Asia for Cloud export sales

James Riley
Wednesday, 02 September 2009 05:08

IT Industry - Market

The public beta is expected to last a couple of months, and then the service will be marketed across Australia to small businesses seeking to lower costs and add flexibility to their computing environments.

But having spent more than $10 million in recent times on a massive data centre facility upgrade, Melbourne IT hopes its cloud services offering will quickly become a large proportion of its overall business.

And Gore says exports will play a big part in that expansion.

“While we won’t be marketing the service overseas initially, after the public beta stage we will be having a look around the Asia Pacific in particular to see where we can start selling this service,” Gore said.

Earlier, at the massive VMworld conference in San Francisco, VMware president and chief executive officer Paul Maritz that the vCloud service would make enterprise-class cloud services available to anyone with a credit card.

Previously, he said, the bullet-proof, high-end cloud services were priced such that only that largest companies could afford to take advantage of the architecture.

“The promise of cloud computing gives companies of all sizes a way to scale quickly to respond to the needs of their business and get out of the business of just maintaining the ‘plumbing’,” Maritz said.

“This week at VMworld, VMware and its partners will be delivering on this promise by introducing new technologies and services that are designed to give customers application compatibility, enterprise-readiness and choice in type of service and location to enable seamless interoperability and mobility between internal and external clouds.”
 
The Melbourne IT service will be priced at a rate the commensurate with offerings from other VMware partners across the world – as part of its VMware arrangement. Pricing is generally in units or per CPU/hour, with a variety of storage options on top.

Gore said he expected in the early stages the most popular vCloud Express option to be a single CPU with 1GB of memory priced at 8 cents an hour (but scalable up to four CPUs and more.)