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Some of you are going to be asking "what is cloud computing really?" Well I have used the following youtube video to help put some clarity around this - actually I used it again this morning. It's American and a bit cheesy but still helpful.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdBd14rjcs0
Now that you know what cloud computing is, here's a media release about our new Cloud computing service:
IT services company CodeBlue has launched a Cloud computing service with high-availability servers starting at just $200 per month.
This price point means CodeBlue’s Cloud servers cost around the same to implement as traditional in house servers - but cost less to service and support. They also provide significant benefits such as high availability, automated backup and disaster recovery, and the flexibility of being able to ‘dial up or dial down’ server capacity according to demand.
CodeBlue Hawke’s Bay manager says while there’s been much hype around Cloud computing, savvy business owners have been waiting until there’s a strong and obvious business case for moving to locate their servers in the Cloud instead of on their own premises.
“CodeBlue’s Cloud service is the first to offer Cloud computing at an entry price point directly comparable with on premises servers,” he says.
“This has never been done before. It provides a powerful incentive for customers to now adopt the new Cloud computing model, knowing they will reap not only service and support savings, but also major service improvement benefits.”
The CodeBlue Cloud service is designed for both small and medium sized businesses. Cloud services are often complementary to existing on-premises servers - CodeBlue helps customers decide which servers to keep internally, and which to operate in the cloud to get the right mix for their business.
“Our approach is to find the most cost effective and pragmatic strategy for customers. This typically involves using existing on premises servers for local file and print and running standard Microsoft Office applications. Higher demand applications such as accounting software, ERP systems, sales and service systems, CRMs and Intranets are all candidates for application servers running in the Cloud,” says Marcus Smith.
Smith says CodeBlue is unique in not having a vested interest in either Cloud or in house solutions. “We’re agnostic. We’re interested in the lowest costs and highest service levels - and we’ll use whatever technology we can to help customers achieve that objective.”
He says a major advantage of Cloud computing for small to medium sized businesses is that it makes highly sophisticated technology affordable. For example, CodeBlue’s Cloud servers are fully virtualised using VMware at an enterprise level. This means 99.99 percent availability. If a server goes down, another server automatically takes over without the user noticing any change. CodeBlue prices Service Level Agreements lower for virtualised servers, whether it’s in the Cloud or on premises.
“There are hard, quantifiable savings from adopting virtualised servers,” Marcus Smith says. “The Cloud allows businesses to benefit from these savings - without the expense of implementing a virtualised server environment internally.”
The Cloud also enables Backup and Disaster Recovery to be handled automatically at much lower cost than with internal systems. Another big advantage is that if customers require more server capacity for periods of peak load they can simply ‘dial it up’ on a pay as you use basis. This means customers don’t have to buy server capacity for peak demand which then is underutilised at non peak periods.
“For us Cloud computing is just a means to an end. CodeBlue’s success is based on our promise to customers that we will reduce their overall IT service costs while at the same time improving services levels – all for a fixed monthly cost. As technology moves ahead we’re continually finding new ways to achieve our customer promise and Cloud Computing is an important new tool in our customer value delivery process,” Smith says.
02:27, 11.02.2010
Really solid and incisive post.
The cloud is giving birth to some amazing breakthroughs. For example, we spent 7 years developing and market testing a small business ERP system.
As well as making our system available to every small business around the globe, its also gave us the opportunity to significantly reduce the cost to end users who know they want an ERP solution but previously could not afford it.
As system developers we have been able to harness state of the art web tools to design and build a system that is incredibly user friendly and can be deployed without expensive ERP consultants.
The feedback from our customers in 24 countries has been unanimous – “salesorder.com is easy to use and can be implemented in just days”.
This feedback has given us the confidence to offer a ‘white label” version of our small business ERP to technology resellers, accounting firms and other organisations who are working with small businesses and want to ‘get into the cloud opportunity’.
Now traditional applications such as ERP will become a commodity as a direct result of cloud computing.
Clouds are cool……
08:07, 11.02.2010
Where did you get the idea that you were first with Cloud computing? How is it that you think that you are unique in your approach? This is certainly not the case. I’ve seen many service providers in NZ have cloud computing infrastructure already or alternatively resell Amazon’s. Provisioning of virtual servers is much normally much faster than traditional servers typically a few minutes so it shouldn’t cost the same to implement the service unless you were installing manually. Interesting attempt at marketing.
09:20, 11.02.2010
First with “affordable” is the marketing pitch. What we are offering is a complete VMware based server which the client can do what they like with based in a New Zealand data centre.
There are many Cloud based providers out there (most offering just SAAS) but when you start drilling in to it it get’s pretty expensive. What we set out to achieve is to set a price point that was comparable to having an onsite solution.
You mention Amazon and my response to that would be to consider the latency. New Zealand’s international broadband pipe is still pretty weak and offshore based cloud offerings are always going to cause issues. Microsoft has released some of it’s apps into the cloud market which is hosted in a datacentre in Singapore. Office communication server is unusable due to latency issues.
10:10, 13.02.2010
Latency would be an issue with real time protocols such as VoIP but as a application or file server Amazon’s service is very good and much cheaper that $200 per month. Maxnet do an excellent service NZ in their high availability datacentre and also use VMWare at a very good price point. No doubt you have a very good service on very good hardware but your claim to be the first at this price point may be as you say “a marketing pitch”
12:12, 13.02.2010
Okay so we are going to have to agree to disagree regarding cloud services based internationally however to clarifiy your point regarding Maxnet. This is acutally a Maxnet / CodeBlue partnership and there is a combined stratergy to offer these services to the domestic market via the CodeBlue brand.
The first to market at this price point was not something “plucked” out of the air and had some serious (and expensive) market research done before we made this claim.
12:29, 12.02.2011
this is my first visit and just wanted to stop by to say Hello Everyone!.