Hosted Solutions lands customer for enterprise public cloud

Tier1 Research — February 8, 2010

Hosted Solutions is bringing in customers for its new line of cloud infrastructure services, which includes public and private clouds, as well as a hybrid option that allows customers to cross-connect between traditional managed infrastructure to a cloud environment (public or private).

The newest customer is Remote Relief, a remote systems management provider.
Remote Relief has moved its application infrastructure, including applications servers and databases, to Hosted Solutions' Stratus Trusted Cloud, which is a public cloud built on VMware. This is fully managed environment and the customer is tied into a multi-year contract, billed on a monthly basis.

Remote Relief decided on a cloud infrastructure environment because it wanted to take advantage of VMware's high availability, load balancing and disaster recovery capabilities. Scalability was also an issue for the customer. Remote Relief's application is its core business and it wanted to be able to scale up infrastructure seamlessly to ensure optimal performance for its customers. Hosted Solutions offers customers a minimum commit level for its infrastructure usage, and when resources scale or burst upwards, billing is metered.

It is also worth noting that Hosted Solutions is in the process of building a management portal for its public cloud. This will give customers the option of controlling and managing their infrastructure. It is likely to be an add-on option, although management says it is considering the possibility of offering it in place of the managed layer and at a different price point.

T1R quick take
As this win demonstrates, Hosted Solutions is playing in the mid-tier to enterprise segments of the cloud market. It is going after customers looking for an enterprise-grade cloud environment along with a high-touch management layer. This puts it in competition with the likes of Terremark and Verizon Business – adding more validation for a space that is still just starting to emerge. Hosted Solutions is showing that it can bring in customers and notably, recently cross-sold an existing customer – Belk – Stratus Trusted Cloud for some back-end infrastructure functions.

T1R anticipates more momentum for enterprise public clouds in 2010 as organizations look to exploit the advantages of cloud computing, supported by managed services and industrial-strength security. While deals like this one – for mission-critical applications and core infrastructure - are great, existing customers are going to present just as important of an opportunity in the areas of testing and development, storage and back-end IT tasks and processes.