South African service providers are contemplating providing customers with full dedicated cloud-computing services.
According to Citrix Systems local country head Nick Keene, Internet service providers are looking at growing the offerings that many currently provide into fully-fledged service offerings. "Full provision is coming."
Keene says services may include infrastructure hosting, software as a service, and Web 2.0 application delivery. "There are definitely a number of service providers moving towards offering all of the services. However, the key will be the delivery method."
While he did not reveal which providers are likely to start full provisioning, he says they are well placed to offer these kinds of services.
Many already offer some of the services. MWeb has a hosted Microsoft Exchange service, while Internet Solutions has a number of cloud offerings.
Cloud computing has, over the last few years, gained wide acceptance, allowing businesses to have specialists focus on IT delivery, while they concentrate on their core business objectives, says Keene.
Gartner confirms the interest in the solution, saying: "Underneath the fog, there are very real trends toward cloud platforms and also toward massively scalable processing." During a recent presentation, Gartner researcher Daryl Plummer said the trend has allowed businesses to choose how they will acquire or deliver IT services.
The right price
In response to the growing trend, Citrix Systems has released its Citrix Cloud Centre (C3), which is based on the company's XenServer, Netscaler and WanScaler technologies.
The product is directly aimed at the emerging full cloud provisioning market. "This unique combination lets next-generation cloud providers take advantage of the most widely-adopted virtual infrastructure platform for hosted cloud services," says Keene.
He notes that customers who have services based on the Xen hypervisor asked Citrix to help offer a richer set of virtualised IT infrastructure services. "The Citrix strategy will focus on equipping both new and existing cloud providers with the infrastructure needed to deliver successful clouds to their customers."
Keene says the primary concern for most cloud providers lies in the way companies should be billed. "Companies buying into hosted solutions are asking to be billed on a pay-per-use model. Contrary to this, many cloud providers are finding it hard to monitor usage and then bill accordingly."
C3 has been developed to address this primary challenge for providers. The solution offers a tool that monitors incoming and outgoing traffic in the cloud system. It also communicates with the virtualisation layer, turning on and off services as they are required, he says.
The company also recently released its XenServer 5 offering. The new version has been tweaked to address high-availability.
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