IT Clouds taps Cisco, EMC, VMware cloud alliance to serve SMEs

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 16 November 2010 10:00

IT Industry - Strategy

Australian company, IT Clouds has launched cloud based computing services targeted at SMBs who have a need for scalable infrastructure and software but a lack the capital to be able to make the transition.

IT Clouds says it is offering "an enterprise class service built upon the VCE stack of technology from VMware, Cisco and EMC." The company says it has worked closely with VMware over the past year in the various beta programs for VMware's Cloud Director and Chargeback products, and is now making these generally available as self-service toolkits allowing existing customers to provision infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and software as a service (SaaS).

VCE - the Virtual Computing Environment - is an alliance formed between Cisco, VMware and EMC in November 2009 to help enterprise customers build 'private cloud' virtualised data centres by offering complete data centre packages of integrated servers, storage, networking and virtualisation software, known as Vblocks. Also, VMware's Cloud Director forms the basis of the Optus Elevate IaaS offering announced in September.

According to Kon Georgopoulos, IT Clouds' head of products and technology, "Our customers can scale compute, memory, storage, network and security on-demand. Deploy software and pre-built virtual services from our catalogue repositories. There is significant benefit to our customers as they can activate services in minutes." said

He added: "We are not aiming to become another 'server-on-a-stick' company that you can click on a link, register, provide a credit card and away you go. We work closely with our customers, stabilise current IT, develop a strategic roadmap for transformation and assist with execution."

According to Georgopoulos, "The largest barrier to cloud service adoption stems from the abundance of heavily tenanted public cloud services. Consumers of such services have concerns with security, performance and fit for purpose. This forces organisations to deploy private clouds even though the cost-benefit may not stack up."

IT Clouds claims to support all Microsoft operating systems from Window 2003 onwards an RHEL from 5.3 onwards. The company is a Microsoft partner and offers a range of Microsoft applications including Exchange, SharePoint and SQL 2005 onwards as catalogued items available for deployment. It also offers "traditional managed IT services to assist organisations run hybrid clouds and traditional non-cloud services."

It has named The Farm Digital, an Australian based digital media agency, as an early customer of the service and quotes managing director, Chris Pile, saying: "Cloud services has allowed The Farm Digital to remove the management overhead and associated costs of supporting multiple hosted environments for our customers. These environments are sometimes short term and complex and without the ability to scale up and down as required it would be very difficult to remain cost competitive."