Infraserve adds to portfolio with ThinkGrid

Newly launched cloud-based distributor, Infraserve, has partnered with IT services platform provider, ThinkGrid.

Managing director and founder, Roy Pater, told ARN ThinkGrid had a local presence and datacentre, along with a strong partner focus. The distributor recently signed its first agreement with security vendor, Seccom Global.

“The other reason we chose them was because their backend systems for billing and provisioning were highly automated,” Pater said. “It puts the billing and provisioning in the hands of resellers, us as the distributor and the customer. There was choice as to who could handle billing and provisioning.”

Infraserve will work with Thinkgrid’s master distributor Vadis Systems to continue to grow the vendor’s Australian base in the cloud services market.

“Our value with resellers is that we’ll give them full training, all the marketing material they need to sell it and we also give them a billing and provisioning engine,” he said. “There’s enough for resellers to do get their head around the cloud. Once we do that we’ll get into the next realm of getting into rebates and other incentives going. We want to focus on helping resellers get their business into the cloud as quickly as possible. Pater said it would target the 5–500 user market. Through providing a billing and provisioning platform, resellers can offer customers a fully scalable range of IT services such as hosted virtual desktops, exchange and communications, VoIP, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), virtual server infrastructure and cloud storage on a ‘pay monthly’ basis without long term onerous contracts, he said.

“Resellers have a prime opportunity to capitalise on this trend [cloud computing], but they must move quickly to defend their business from other vendors such as the telcos and hosting companies who are moving rapidly into cloud computing.”

Pater said he was in discussions with high-end cloud storage vendors and monitoring providers as well. ThinkGrid CEO, Rob Lovell, said businesses often underestimated the sheer scale of investment needed to build and run cloud computing infrastructures.

“Bringing together a range of technologies to create a highly-scalable cloud platform is difficult enough, let alone adding the billing and provisioning engine that ensures customers can flick a switch, scale up or down services and pay for them as needed,” Lovell said. “You’ve then got to employ the type of expertise that can make sure this vast infrastructure stays up and running. Get any of this wrong and you’ll be out of the cloud business almost as soon as you’ve entered it.”

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