Telecommunications and hosting provider Macquarie Telecom is claiming its infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) Cloud offering is better than those from Telstra and Optus.
According to the company’s hosting managing director, Aidan Tudehope, this is because it offers local managed enterprise Cloud. It can be done from the telco’s managed servers, co-location servers as well as in-house infrastructure over a wide area network (WAN) or virtual private network (VPN).
“There have been a lot of Cloud announcements and some of those haven’t gone beyond a media release. If I look at what the differentiators are (between us and other telcos), there are differences on where the data is residing.
Telstra are heavily reliant on reselling the Microsoft Business Productivity Online suite out of Singapore and Optus have gone for the unmanaged side of IaaS.”
Tudehope cited an IDC statement that “telcos will win the Cloud war because they own the infrastructure that makes Cloud possible.”
A Telstra public affairs spokesperson said it had been offering an IaaS platform with managed enterprise Cloud known as Silver Lining since April 2010. Currently it has 98 customers for the platform including Komatsu.
Telstra also offers Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite and will be hosting the vendors' Web-based Office 365 platform on its T-Suite environment later this year.
“We think it’s healthy to have competition and for companies to have their own IaaS offering. We haven’t made a big song and dance about IaaS but we’ll be making some cloud announcements later this year,” he said.
An Optus spokesperson declined to comment on Macquarie Telecom’s offering as it had not the chance to review it in detail. The telecommunications company launched its IaaS offering in September 2010.
Macquarie Enterprise Cloud is an integrated IaaS allowing customers to ramp up or burst computing capacity on demand. Cloud bursting can be done through data services from any telecommunication carrier or dark fibre into the Macquarie hosting facility in Sydney.
“The vast bulk of Cloud services in the hosting space is unmanaged,” claims Tudehope.
“Enterprise Cloud is about offering our customers the ability to burst on demand from numerous locations such as their own data centre. It’s that breadth combined with the telco element that allows us to give end to end management that we see as a global first.”
Although he would not say how many customers Macquarie Telecom has for the service, there have been a number testing Enterprise Cloud.
“Lots of customers have been testing it and those customers who continue will go into live production. There are one or two who will stay on the beta testing,” he said.
Pricing for the Cloud offering starts at $99 plus GST a month.
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