Macquarie launches enterprise IaaS cloud offering

Macquarie Telecom has unveiled its managed enterprise cloud services product offering infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS).

The telco has touted it as the first enterprise cloud service of its kind in Australia.

Macquarie Enterprise Cloud is an integrated IaaS allowing customers to ramp up – or ‘burst’ – computing capacity on-demand. This can be done from the telco’s managed servers, co-location servers as well as in-house infrastructure over a wireless access network (WAN) or virtual private network (VPN).

Bursting can be conducted through data services from any carrier whether it is Telstra DSL services or dark fibre into the Macquarie hosting facility. Data transfer is unmetered.

Telstra, through a partnership with Accenture, and Optus both entered cloud infrastructure and IT services space last year.

Macquarie conceded the extensive communications infrastructure of the two major telcos is advantageous in providing cloud offerings, but the advent of the National Broadband Network (NBN) will even out the playing field in that respect.

The Enterprise Cloud offering is vendor and operation system agnostic, another key sell-point for Macquarie.

The challenge for enterprise customers in adopting the cloud is having to trade-off the benefits of a public cloud over the security of doing (dedicated hosting) IT in-house, according to Macquarie hosting managing director, Aidan Tudehope.

Macquarie’s new enterprise cloud offering can offer flexibility of a public cloud while still providing risk mitigation, he said. This gives the telco a way to tap into a market that has had reservations taking up cloud computing.

Emphasis on providing a managed service was also propped up as a differentiator to other cloud players.

Macquarie claimed most cloud providers in the hosting space provide unmanaged services and lack resources for support.

“This is not conducive to enterprise adoption,” Tudehope said. “Without access to people, support to actually help the adoption and migration is greatly restricted.”

Access to account executives, cloud solutions architects and the engineering team comes as part of the package with Enterprise Cloud.

The service is available today. Existing Alpha and Beta trial customers will be moved onto the full service.

In an effort to combat privacy and regulatory gripes related to data residency, Enterprise Cloud is hosted in Macquarie’s local datacentres in Sydney and Canberra. Its second Sydney datacentre, the Intellicentre 2, is set to be completed by Christmas this year.

Pricing for the Enterprise Cloud offering starts at $99 per month, which is a management fee. Varying levels of bursting will be charged on top. Macquarie has experienced a 30 per cent year-on-year growth in its managed services and hosting division over the last three years.

Last November, Macquarie Telecom formed a three-year partnership with IPscape in which the telco will host critical applications for IPscape in its datacentre. It will offer cloud enabled services as well as manage routers, switches, firewalls and Internet services for IPscape.

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