update Optus’s business division and its subsidiary Alphawest today announced the launch of a new scalable commercial enterprise ‘cloud’ service — Optus Cloud Solutions — which will be available to enterprise customers from October 1st.
“Services are delivered via the Optus Evolve network and our secure datacentre facilities, giving businesses the added assurance that their data is in good hands,” said Rob Parcell, acting managing director, Optus Business.
The launch was held at a popular CBD venue and executives involved in the project were present for the cloud services launch — Parcell, Scott Mason, director of fixed products, marketing and strategy, Optus Business and one early customer — Julian Dawson, director of infrastructure services, Curtin University of Technology
The infrastructure is called Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and delivered through Optus’ ‘Evolve’ IP network. Optus Business is in partnership with the joint VMWare, Cisco and EMC technology platform to provide the cloud computing services.
The telecommunications giant will provide the the services as ‘slices’ — a typical slice would be 0.5GHz and 1GB RAM, at $125 per month. Two pricing tiers will also be on offer for storage on Optus cloud infrastructure — high performance storage at 60c per gigabyte, per month and ‘economy’ storage at 30c.
Additional services such as operating licenses and firewalls will incur additional costs. Optus was not able to comment on the details of the pricing structure for firewall and operating system services, however. Clients will be able to use their own OS of choice and customers who wish to let Optus take care of OS services will be restricted to Microsoft Windows.
The service is scalable and customer’s administrators will be scale it up and down as they see fit through Optus’ self-service portal. The portal will allow administrators to create, manage and use Virtual machines, catalogues, users and groups.
“Optus Cloud Solutions have been designed to give customers the flexibility, agility and control to scale their IT services up and down in real time to support business requirements and fluctuations, without having to maintain their own infrastructure,” said Parcell. Service desk support will be on hand 24/7 — change and service management reports will also be available.
Optus’ cloud services beta was launched in the second week of February this year. Amongst the handful of enterprise customers to trial the service was Perth-based university Curtin and property services company Savills.
Curtin initially had some concerns that Optus’ Sydney-based datacentre would cause noticeable latency, however it was found during the months’ long trial that this was not the case — latency was fair below the mark expected. As well as Curtin community benefits, the Optus Cloud Computing Solution is used at Curtin to support a major astronomy research project.
“Researchers like to have the flexibility to manage their IT requirements based on a switch on, switch off basis. We see a real opportunity to provision bespoke environments for researchers so they can access computing on demand. This model could also be potentially extended to students as we progress along the cloud journey,” said Peter Nikoletatos, CIO of Curtin University of Technology.
Parcell said that Optus didn’t have any future plans to release the services to the consumer market.
Image credit: Michael Zimmer, Creative Commons
Typo, 6th paragraph: “and sperating system service” -> ” and operating system service”
Cheers, fixed!
Slices…hmm…anchovies on mine please!
Seriously though…interesting product on the surface, be interested to see what sort of take up it manages. Also a little puzzled that less than a month out from an actual launch, that they clearly haven’t nailed out a full pricing structure. Clearly a toe-in-the-toddler-pool exercise while they flash out an expected ROI time frame…
Personally I think it’s more or less a standard VCE implementation of the type I expect quite a few systems integrators and telcos to roll out. The real question is … is it anything new, or just an iteration of the sort of services people have already been buying?
It’s a bit light on the detail from Optus – (but that’s normal) – but it sounds much the same as everyone else.
I feel the reason they’ve not been specific on price is that they want to spend this next month gauging actual interest from the market, and getting a feel for how much they will need to charge to get their initial outlay back within a time frame that is already set. They should have 12, 24, and 36 month targets for returns for something like this.
Once they’ve got a feel for potential uptake, they can set a price to trying and meet those return targets. Expect good deals at the start – Optus are notorious for dropping their pants on business offerings to get the deals over the line.
Interesting article although its perplexing they dont have a pricing model, is this because they are trying to gauge what a customer will pay or is it because they have no idea. Surely some services from a credible accountant could build a pricing model.
In regards to the VCE pitch for the optus cloud, will be an interesting space to watch given Optus/Alphawest push NetApp to most of their strategic customers.
Finally I wonder why Savills didnt make comment?
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