Virtualisation: News

A new cloud service provider has entered the market and has set SMBs into its sights.

Bitcloud is a division of Buchen Holdings which, through various acquisitions, has 15 years experience in the Internet space.

The company is moving into the SMB sector and is able to service organisations with up to 500 seats. It is offering infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and software-as-a-service (SaaS).

The idea came about during the upgrade of internal infrastructure with cloud services for Buchen Holdings’ hosting business including Webcity and Host1.

Products on offer include Microsoft Exchange servers as well as computing and storage on demand.

BitCloud has also formed a partnership with Dell for its cloud architecture platform which covers blade servers.

AAPT is supplying communication links to BitCloud’s datacentre.

“We’re not playing the enterprise, we are going after your people doing retail and so on from five to 150 to 500 seats,” BitCloud CSO, Darren Covington, said.

BitCloud is adopting a direct and channel model for sales. It currently has no channel partners but is actively looking for independent software vendors (ISVs) to pair with as part of phase one of its channel program.

It is roughly looking for five to seven ISVs.

BitCloud may delve into the existing 1600 strong partner base of its hosting sister companies but will predominantly hunt for partners externally.

Phase two of its channel strategy is expected to kick in early next year which will include recruiting system integrators.

“We will be choosing partners based on specific values, either by industry or verticals, application stack or integration process-based values,” Covington said.

BitCloud is unperturbed by possible channel conflict as a result of a direct and indirect sales model.

“In the SMB marketspace there are more customers than an organisation of our size with the right balance of channel partners can cover,” Covington said. “Yes, we will have channel conflict but we will deal with it quickly and fairly.”

BitCloud has put an emphasis on cloud security and has put into place a number of steps to ensure the security of customer information assets, according to BitCloud CEO, Bennet Oprysa.

“We know how security works even more specifically at the smaller end of the market where customers themselves don’t have security components and are essentially relying on us for everything,” he said.

Last September, UK-based cloud service provider, ThinkGrid, took its first steps into the Australian SMB market, offering services similar to that of BitCloud.

It was selling through its local partner, Skybox.

Perth-based fabrication, construction and services company, AGC, has gone through an extensive overhaul of its technology infrastructure over the past year that has seen — among other things — a number of Windows 95 PCs finally phased out and the latest network, storage, datacentre, desktop and telephony technology installed.

APC has taken the wraps off of its first dedicated datacentre demonstration and training facility in the Western Australian region.

Virtualisation management vendor Veeam’s new channel manager has set her sights on making resellers “self-sufficient”.

Raising the stakes in its war of words, Microsoft today said Google simply doesn't understand what businesses need, and is failing at pushing its way into the enterprise.

IT services provider, Harbour MSP, has become the first customer for datacentre provider, NextDC, booking in 1000sqm of space at its Melbourne facility.

HP continued to dominate the Asia-Pacific server market based on unit shipments with 29.7 per cent share, while IBM led the charge in terms of revenue due to strong mainframe sales, according to the latest market data from Gartner.

Enterprise open-source software vendor Red Hat has acquired cloud software provider Makara, Red Hat announced Tuesday. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

While many Oracle customers are interested in running IT services on private clouds, most are still in the early stages of development, a new study from the Independent Oracle Users Group has found.

Dimension Data becomes the first partner to join the V-Alliance desktop virtualisation program

The two local partners are the first to globally enter into Microsoft's new Cloud Accelerate program

Netflix moved some of its most crucial IT operations over to Amazon Web Services' Elastic Compute Cloud in order to save money and gain flexibility compared to using more Oracle software and IBM iron.

Fujitsu has taken the wrappers off its multi-million dollar Perth datacentre to target growing cloud opportunities in the Asian market.

Bernard Kwok is Symantec's senior vice-president of the Asia-Pacific and Japan (APJ) geography, responsible for driving its sales and business development across more than 17 countries. He is no stranger to leading a team – wearing the 'boss hat' at a host of tech companies. He caught up with ARN to reflect on his professional achievements, some of the hurdles along the way and the way forward.