Macquarie Telecom’s move into self-managed Cloud computing services has paid off, with Ninefold reporting hundreds of customers signing up to the service in the first four months.
Though unwilling to reveal exact customer numbers, Ninefold managing director, Peter James, told Computerworld Australia that the fledgling Cloud provider had witnessed “three-digit” customer growth since launching in late January this year.
Its customer was currently comprised largely of small businesses utilising Ninefold’s elastic compute service as a basic, locally stored test and development platform. However, according to James that market had since grown to larger companies looking for the same platform.
“Where people want to spin up some servers and do some scaling elastic test dev, that’s an area we play pretty much to,” he said.
Since launch, the company had focussed on chasing a six-month roadmap with staged product releases every two to four weeks based on Agile processes. These have included introduction of VMware-based hypervisors to complement the XenServer capability already on offer and launching a public beta of a Cloud storage service based on EMC’s Atmos platform in late March.
Future functionality drops would more likely include expansions to Ninefold’s Compute API and wikis designed to educate customers on specific Cloud services.
Unlike some providers like Telstra, which has slowly built its ‘Silver Lining’ infrastructure-as-a-service platform in the background in efforts to perfect it before more widely approaching march, James said Ninefold’s mentality was more one of get in quick and improve progressively.
“I think this is a market in which you need to be agile, you need to be quick,” James said.
“The Cloud technology market is evolving quickly so we’ve always seen we’d get into the market with a good offering, but then every two to four weeks you can expect Ninefold would be coming into the market with additional offerings.
"We have a roadmap that takes us out six to nine months.”
The storage service in particular had proved fruitful in breaking the price premium the vendor previously suffered in comparison to Amazon’s Cloud services.
Ninefold’s partnership with EMC is also the first time the Cloud vendor has hinted at its back-end infrastructure since launch.
James was unwilling to detail more about the infrastructure but assured the services were vendor-agnostic and ran on a tailored infrastructure rather than picking a Virtual Compute Environment currently being pushed by a consortium of EMC, VMware and Cisco.
Further announcements around Ninefold’s infrastructure would likely be made in future, James said, but the company was largely focused on maintaining closer relationships with the development startup community through offline forums.
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