IT players looking for the perfect cloud

TALK to just about anybody in the IT sector in Western Australia, and one topic guaranteed to come up is cloud computing.

Nearly every IT firm in Perth has plans to introduce or upgrade their cloud-computing offer, yet many still debate what the term really means.

They might also point out that most businesses have been using cloud computing for years, but just didn’t know it because it was called something else.

ZettaServe chief executive Nathan Harman agrees there is some truth in this.

In fact, he says cloud computing has been part of the Perth firm’s product suite for a long time, specifically through its ownership of internet service providers.

“In the online space, cloud computing is dominating, albeit the businesses we run have always been cloud, its just that the label is newly popular,” Dr Harman said.

This might seem a sceptics comment, but Dr Harman is actually very positive about the wider applications of cloud computing.

“The model is fantastic, we love the idea, it really does work for us,” he said.

L7 Solutions chief executive Matt Sullivan also accepts there is an element of truth in the critique but remains a believer in cloud computing.

“If you look down the track in three to five years, I think you’ll say a revolution has taken place,” Mr Sullivan said.

Some people equate the cloud with computing over the internet, but it’s much more than that.

“It’s basically IT on consumption,” Mr Sullivan said. “Treating IT as a utility and being able to pay on demand as you consume.”

Datacom’s director of strategic development, Mark McWilliams, posits that the topic is “at the peak of the hype cycle” but like his peers expects real change to flow from the uptake of cloud computing.

“It’s lots of technology and services coming together, framed by a new commercial model around flexible pay-as-you-use delivery,” Mr McWilliams said.

HPC Data Centres finance director Simon MacFarlane said that “business is still struggling to understand what cloud computing means”.

He characterises it as a reversal of a long-term trend.

In the early days of computing there was a powerful mainframe and ‘dumb’ terminals.

That changed with the rise of personal computers, with all the ‘brains’ going to the desktop.

“That’s getting difficult to manage and you are now seeing that power go back to the centre,” Mr McFarlane said.

It’s useful to look at a few simple examples to illustrate the emergence of cloud computing services.

Every business that goes to an ISP to set up its email service and host its web site has used a basic form of cloud computing.

Buying software over the internet, rather than installing it on the office computer, is another example.

Similarly, renting space in a data centre and using its servers, such as for web hosting, rather than buying new hardware, is a form of cloud computing.

The term, which derives from the cloud symbol that is often used in flow charts to symbolise the internet, has emerged over the past five years as global heavyweights Amazon, Google, IBM and Microsoft have launched cloud services.

Apple is the latest computing giant looking to offer a cloud service.

Capacity

Amazon’s EC2 (elastic compute cloud) has been one of the success stories. It is promoted as a provider of ‘resizable computer capacity’, delivering complete control to users and ‘changing the economics of computing by allowing you to pay only for the capacity that you actually use’.

However, for a few days last month, users of the service, such as social networking site FourSquare, didn’t use any computing capacity because the EC2 data centre in the US crashed.

That highlighted one of the great risks of cloud computing, or at least ‘public clouds’, which involve accessing computing services via the internet.

The alternative is a private cloud, which is defined as ‘virtual’ IT infrastructure that is securely controlled and operated solely for one organisation.

If that definition seems too simple, it probably is: a private cloud can be managed either by the owner of the computing infrastructure or a third party, and it can exist on or off premises or in combination.

Local interest

ZettaServe’s Dr Harman said the take-up of cloud computing in WA had been modest.

“Small and medium-sized businesses have embraced it much more because they tend to be less process oriented, its easier for them to try something,” he said.

“Corporates are talking about it a lot but are only just putting their toe in the water.

“They have a lot of baggage, their own IT departments and their own systems, which are more difficult to change.

“We expect over time the corporate market will be the big one but it’s evolving more slowly.”

Mr Sullivan has observed a similar trend.

“Our clients are getting different advice about what cloud is and what they should be doing so our advisory group is doing cloud feasibility studies,” he said.

“We look at their business plan, what applications they’ve got, their compliance needs in terms of what they are allowed to put on the cloud.

“We also look at return on investment and ask does it make sense.”

Mr Sullivan said these reviews had produced some interesting results.

“People have looked at putting email out to the cloud because it’s the most commoditised part of IT but they’ve realised its so meshed in with their business process its foolish to put it out there at this point.”

Plenty of choice

Judging by the activities of IT firms in Perth, businesses in WA will have no shortage of cloud computing packages put in front of them.

ASG Group has recently introduced a locally hosted private cloud to deliver managed services and applications to its business clients.

Through its subsidiary Dowling Consulting, ASG has also launched what it calls Australia’s first cloud-enabled service catalogue.

This enables clients to access other software applications on-demand in a ‘pay-as-you-grow’ model.

In a similar vein, Empired is planning to introduce cloud-computing services through its FlexScale service.

“IT services can be packaged into consumable IT ‘products’,” chief executive Russell Baskerville said.

“These products are offered through cloud computing in the form of online service catalogues in much the same way as using a shopping cart.”

ISA Technologies announced last month that it now offers cloud services. Its marketing material indicates some of the options:

“ISA’s cloud services span all types of cloud, whether it be private, public or hybrid, and covers various models of cloud, including software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS),” the company said.

Another local company, Amcom Telecommunications, announced early this year it plans to fast track its entry into the cloud market by partnering with Dimension Data subsidiary BlueFire.

“We’re now adding a powerful suite of IT solutions hosted in the cloud,” chief executive Clive Stein said.

“We are in a unique position to leverage our extensive fibre networks and customer base to deliver private cloud services across our secure network.”

ZettaServe launched its cloud service a year ago, through its subsidiary ZettaGrid.

Its services include virtual servers and virtual desktops and cloud networks with capacity on demand.

Dr Harman said the group’s other businesses helped its market entry.

Its largest ISP, Highway 1, was already leasing data centre space in four different data centres as a core part of its business.

Highway 1 also offered communication capacity and the group had infrastructure skills in-house.

“It gave us a competitive advantage in getting into the market quickly,” Dr Harman said.

L7 Solutions expects to launch its service later this year.

“We’ll be launching our own cloud offering in three to six months and we’re negotiating for some data centre space at the moment,” Mr Sullivan said.

“Long term we’ll have our own data centre, we’ll call it a cloud centre.

“We don’t want to be a landlord just offering co-location, we want to have a cloud offering.”

Mr Sullivan said L7 was aiming to differentiate its offering based on the integrity of the platform from a security and compliance perspective.

“Everybody will say the same thing but we believe we’re employing best-of-breed architecture,” he said, referring to L7’s links with three major players in the cloud sector.

“We’ve always been a Cisco partner, and we’ve always been an EMC partner and a VMware partner, and about 18 months ago they joined together to create their own cloud strategy, so it just fitted perfectly for L7.”

Mr Sullivan said businesses got the “ultimate cloud” when they paid for computing services like a utility.

“If you get a bill from your service provider which says these are the licences you’ve used, this is the computing power you’ve used, this is the storage you’ve used, this is your report on your anti-virus, and so on, and it’s a consolidated bill, that’s a perfect cloud,” he said.

“But there’s a fair way to go before we get there.”