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ICT solutions and services provider, Dimension Data (DiData), has launched new Cloud services hosted in its managed private Cloud environment.

Based on Microsoft’s productivity solutions, the solution offers a private, single-tenant Cloud environment hosted in DiData’s Australian-based datacentres. There is also an on-premise option.

Built on Microsoft Server and System Center, the fully managed solution allows organisation to maintain the control required for routine tasks through a self-services portal for client administration.

DiData said it provides enterprises with the level of customisation, flexibility and control needed to address unique business requirements.

“By offering our clients managed productivity solutions in a private Cloud environment, DiData is helping remove the barriers that have previously inhibited some organisations from placing key business services in the Cloud,” DiData Microsoft solutions global general manager, Peter Menadue, said.

“By basing this offering on our Managed Cloud Platform, DiData is enabling enterprises around the globe to take a key step in their journey to the Cloud with the security, compliance, and customisation assurances they require.”

In addition to enterprises, these Cloud services will benefit government organisations, according to Microsoft Australia partner business director, Dean Swan.

Dimension Data New Zealand has launched 3D Workspace, an outsourced desktop-as-a-service offering for cloud and traditional computer users.

Unveiled at the 2013 New Zealand CIO Summit in Auckland, the company says 3D Workspace allows users secure access to their desktop on any device from any location and can be easily scaled up and down to meet the evolving requirements of both the user and the business..

“Increasingly, organisations have to adapt to a blended workforce that includes a mix of office-based and mobile workers, as well as full-time, part-time and contract workers,” says Simon Gillespie, CEO, Dimension Data NZ.

“This has led to many companies to provide a desktop environment that works, no matter where an employee is based, or how often they log into the system.”

Gillespie says the new 3D Workspace platform provides a flexible, efficient and functional solution by integrating the cloud experience with that of the traditional desktop.

“In addition, it allows IT staff to manage desktops remotely through a single portal, while the core platform is managed, monitored and maintained by Dimension Data,” he says.

“With 3D Workspace, organisations no longer need to worry about where their employees are based, or the mechanics of IT delivery.

“Instead they are able to focus on other areas that will deliver higher value to the business.”

Dimension Data's has launched its managed cloud platform (MCP) is Tokyo, Japan.

Dimension Data has seven public MCPs worldwide with three located in Asia Pacific and Australia: Hong Kong, Sydney, Australia, and Tokyo, Japan.

The MCPs are available for public cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Managed Hosting services. The new Tokyo cloud location aims to provide end-users with low latency access to secure, enterprise-class public, private and hosted private cloud services within the Asia-Pacific region.

According to Bill Padfield, CEO, Dimension Data Asia-Pacific, the company has also established cloud services partners in Indonesia, India and Hong Kong to further expand its footprint.

In addition to the locations in Asia, Dimension Data has deployed public MCPs in Ashburn, Virginia and Santa Clara, California in the United States; Johannesburg, South Africa; and Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

In Asia, Dimension Data has clients in Hong Kong, Indonesia and New Zealand, including retail chains such as Kathmandu, government agencies, educational institutions and financial institutions etc. Dimension Data also hosts hundreds of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) providers, including Accept Software, ClearBenefits, Compuware Gomez, Glassbeam, Thermo Fisher Scientific and Xactly.

Hirokazu Mochizuki, President of Dimension Data Japan said, “We are very excited with the launch of the MCP in Japan. Japan is a huge and major market with a lot of business opportunities for our cloud services.

“We will be offering public, private and hybrid cloud services to multi-nationals and Japanese clients across different sectors in Japan, such as financial, transportation, travel, government and education.”

Dimension Data New Zealand has announced the launch of 3D Workspace, its outsourced desktop-as-a-service offering for cloud and traditional computer users.

3D Workspace allows users secure access to their desktop on any device from any location and can be easily scaled up and down to meet the evolving requirements of both the user and the business.

Simon Gillespie, Dimension Data New Zealand CEO, says, “Increasingly, organisations have to adapt to a blended workforce that includes a mix of office-based and mobile workers, as well as full-time, part-time and contract workers. This has led to many companies to provide a desktop environment that works, no matter where an employee is based, or how often they log into the system.”

“Our new 3D Workspace platform provides a flexible, efficient and functional solution by seamlessly integrating the cloud experience with that of the traditional desktop. In addition, it allows IT staff to manage desktops remotely through a single portal, while the core platform is managed, monitored and maintained by Dimension Data.”

“With 3D Workspace, organisations no longer need to worry about where their employees are based, or the mechanics of IT delivery. Instead they are able to focus on other areas that will deliver higher value to the business,” says Gillespie.

The key components of the 3D Workspace platform are:

• 3D App – application packaging as–a-service; providing best-in-class cost effective application packaging and on-going management. With 3D App, organisations have the ability to upgrade their desktop applications once, with future updates provided without additional capital upgrade costs.
• 3D Virtual – onshore cloud-based desktop-as-a-service that delivers highly effective virtual desktop computing. 3D Virtual provides the ability for users to access their workspace from anywhere, anytime whether it be from a tablet, thin client device, smartphone or a traditional desktop.
• 3D Local – traditional desktop-as-a-service; delivering a cost effective way to manage a traditional desktop and laptop fleet. 3D Local provides best practice desktop management, including application deployment, patching and operating system maintenance.
• “3D Workspace is a comprehensive proposition for all organisations, and the tightly integrated services create a flexible entry point for desktop-as-a-service,” says Gillespie

“In addition, our pricing model allows for a flexible workforce approach and embraces full-time, part-time and shift worker concepts to deliver cost efficiency. This means organisations have the choice to engage any or all of the services that make sense for their business at any point in time.”

Dimension Data's public managed cloud platform (MCP) is now available in Tokyo, Japan and aims to reduce latency for end-users in North Asia.

Dimension Data has seven public MCPs worldwide with three located in Asia Pacific and Australia: Hong Kong, Sydney, Australia, and Tokyo, Japan.

The MCPs are available for public cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Managed Hosting services. The new Tokyo cloud location aims to provide end-users with low latency access to secure, enterprise-class public, private and hosted private cloud services within the Asia Pacific region.

According to Bill Padfield, CEO, Dimension Data Asia Pacific, the company has also established cloud services partners in Indonesia, India and Hong Kong to further expand its footprint.

In addition to the locations in Asia Pacific, Dimension Data has deployed public MCPs in Ashburn, Virginia and Santa Clara, California in the United States; Johannesburg, South Africa; and Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

"Dimension Data offers a differentiated network-centric view of cloud offerings and is using its professional service offerings to highlight its position. Strongly rooted in network engineering, Dimension Data has applied this filter on its approach to offer cloud services to its global enterprise customers," said Gard Little, Research Director, IT Consulting and System Integration Research, and Leslie Rosenberg, Research Manager, Network Life-Cycle Services, in IDC's Vendor Profile on Dimension Data's cloud.

In Asia, Dimension Data has clients in Hong Kong, Indonesia and New Zealand, including retail chains such as Kathmandu, government agencies, educational institutions and financial institutions etc.  Dimension Data hosts hundreds of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) providers, including Accept Software, ClearBenefits, Compuware Gomez, Glassbeam, Thermo Fisher Scientific and Xactly.

Hirokazu Mochizuki, President of Dimension Data Japan said, "We are very excited with the launch of the MCP in Japan. Japan is a huge and major market with a lot of business opportunities for our cloud services. We will be offering public, private and hybrid cloud services to multi-nationals and Japanese clients across different sectors in Japan, such as financial, transportation, travel, government and education."

Dimension Data, an ICT services and solutions provider, has today launched its Public Managed Cloud Platform (MCP) in Tokyo, Japan. It will provide end-users with low-latency access to secure public, private and hosted private cloud services within Asia.

The move hopes to imitate the success the company has achieved in other countries. In Asia, the company has clients from various institutions in the government, educational and financial sectors.

"Japan is a huge and major market with a lot of business opportunities for our cloud services. We will be offering public, private and hybrid cloud services to multinationals and Japanese clients across different sectors in Japan, such as financial, transportation, travel, government and education," says Hirokazu Mochizuki, president of Dimension Data Japan.

With this launch, Dimension Data has now seven Public MCPs globally: Hong Kong, Sydney, Ashburn, Santa Clara, Johannesburg, Amsterdam and Tokyo. 

All the Public MCPs are available for public cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Managed Hosting services. They are enterprise-ready, offering multiple layers of security and administrative controls, 99.99 percent availability SLAs on Public Cloud, 24x7 phone support and integrated management capabilities.

Not too long ago, network infrastructure appeared permanently rooted in the physical world. While storage and processing received the fruits of virtualization – consolidation, dynamic provisioning and all the rest – it seemed networking would forever limited by switches, routers, and wires.

We all know how that turned out. Software defined networking (SDN) made it possible to shift and twist network architectures just as easily as the rest of the data infrastructure, ushering in the possibility of the end-to-end virtual data environment.

Naturally, then, cloud providers have been quick to leverage the possibilities. Networking is now firmly ensconced on the virtual plane, and networking services aren't far behind. And of late, the type and variety of those services have increased by orders of magnitude through a number of key technology partnerships.

Rackspace, for one, has turned to Brocade’s Vyatta virtual switch platform to enable high specialized traffic management across its network services portfolio. The partnership allows Rackspace to push network segmentation to new levels, providing clients with broader control over the kinds of data allowed on certain pathways, as well as user access to the virtual network and other hosted services. In this way, Rackspace hopes to offer not only stronger multitenancy guarantees for multiple clients, but higher levels of service for clients pushing multiple workloads onto the cloud. And since the Vyatta platform is available as a virtual appliance, no messy hardware configurations are needed.

At the same time, Cisco Systems is looking to leverage its recently acquired Meraki outsourcing platform to allow cloud providers to deliver greater network management capabilities to their clients. Meraki users now have access to the Cisco Meraki Managed Services Dashboard, which can be used to build everything from simple LANs and WLANs to highly complex switching, application, and data management functions. At the moment, the dashboard works only with Meraki devices and virtual solutions, but it isn’t hard to imagine Cisco taking steps to enable broader network control before too long.

All of this activity on the services level does not obscure the fact that physical infrastructure can still bring an environment down if not properly cared for. As network speeds within the datacenter increase, so too does the sensitivity to jitter, given that individual packets have less wiggle room within high-speed data streams. That need is producing a new class of crystal oscillators like Silicon Labs’ Si535 and Si536 devices, targeted at everything from 10G and 40G data center environments to massive Carrier Ethernet platforms. The units provide less than 200 femtoseconds (fs) of RMS jitter between 10 kHz and 1 MHz, largely through the company’s DSPLL system, which provides low-jitter performance at high-speed differential frequencies. The devices also use a common fixed-frequency crystal, rather than a different crystal for each frequency, for improved stability and reliability.

Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL), an Indian-based telecommunication services provider, and Dimension Data, have jointly launched their Enterprise Cloud Services in India.

Based on Dimension Data’s Managed Cloud Platform (MCP), BSNL forays into the Enterprise Cloud services space through its Internet Data Centres (IDCs) built in 2012.

Based on a standardised architecture, the MCP offers enterprises the advantage of being able to support public, private and hybrid cloud models. All MCPs are enterprise-ready, offering multiple layers of security, administrative controls, highest availability SLAs, 24/7 phone support and integrated management capabilities.

“With the central, as well as State governments strategically investing in strengthening their E-Governance initiatives to benefit citizens, this public-private partnership to offer cloud services is another step towards realising the larger goal of bridging the gap between citizens and the government,” said Shri Kapil Sibal, Hon’ble Minister of Communications and IT.

Shri R. K. Upadhyay, Chairman & Managing Director, BSNL adds that the IDC and cloud services have not only enabled them to build and add new strategic capabilities to the company’s portfolio, but has also benefited clients who can leverage the company’s sourcing options or simply host their entire IT assets within BSNL’s environment. Shri revealed they have already signed on 10 leading organizations.

“India is a key market for Dimension Data and we continue to make significant investments here,” said Kiran Bhagwanani, CEO, Dimension Data India.

If you were pulling together a business plan to make Amazon (NSDQ:AMZN) Web Services irrelevant to corporate customers, it would be hard to beat Dimension Data's deadly combination of robust end-to-end cloud services combined with multivendor integration skills from a 21,000-strong tech-elite workforce.

The $6 billion CRN Solution Provider 500 global systems integrator, which is looking to double its revenue over the next five years, is doing what every solution provider on the planet should be doing: making big investments to build out its own branded cloud services anchored by its own multivendor systems integration portfolio.

So how fast is the Cisco (NSDQ:CSCO) enterprise partner moving to provide monthly subscription-based offerings within its traditional systems integration legacy business? The South African company on May 7 unveiled a tiered storage services that compares favorably to Amazon Web Services and then, just three days later, acquired managed security services provider Earthwave.

Both moves are game-changers for the company, which is adding 3,000 new employees a year as it moves to deliver a next-generation consulting/IT outsourcing/managed services portfolio. Think of Dimension Data as the ultimate business solution provider delivering a blend of off -premise, on-premise infrastructure and applications aimed at providing customers maximum performance and competitive advantage.

One big advantage as Dimension Data expands its cloud computing services footprint is the financial muscle of its parent company, Japanese telecommunications giant NTT. To its credit, NTT realized that the company's services culture was what set it apart and has built up, not torn down that culture. NTT has, in fact, provided financial firepower to dramatically increase Dimension Data's services footprint.

Amazon Web Services fancies itself as the "buy-infrastructure-on-your-credit-card" company for the "do-it-yourself" generation. Dimension Data, on the other hand, can provide self-provisioning, but it's a "get-it-done-for-the-customer" company.

Dimension Data will install data centre architecture and physical infrastructure for London Gateway, the UK's first 21st Century deep-sea port, parent company DP World has announced.

With the port due to open later this year, Dimension will provide the IT support for its terminal operating system (TOS), which controls operations from managing critical infrastructure such as cranes, through to interfacing with the port's customers 24 hours a day.

When fully deployed, Dimension's automated solution aims to support the loading and unloading of more containers at a faster speed than any other port in the UK. The use of virtualised data centres will also aid in the reduction of power usage and carbon emissions compared with traditional ports.

"In our aim to build a world-class port for the UK, implementing a superior operational system and service is crucial," said Bob Post, head of IT and systems at DP World London Gateway.

"Every hour a vessel is in port it costs money, so the ability to load and unload vessels quickly is essential. The automated nature of the TOS will enable us to offer high availability and more flexible services, while minimising the risk of losses of shipped goods," he continued.

"Dimension Data will deliver a fully integrated, end-to-end data centre and IT infrastructure solution for the entire terminal systems architecture supporting all mission-critical systems," Post added.

This will include installing and managing IT for all of the systems architecture, implementing end-to-end solutions incorporating Microsoft applications, security, networking, cabling, CCTV and telecommunications, all delivered through a MetroCluster solution.

"We are very proud to be part of such a significant development in the UK," said Calvin Goom, managing director of Dimension Data UK.

"The London Gateway project requires an extensive process of analysis and system integration design to develop the technical solution that will give London Gateway a high level of service, combined with the flexibility for future enhancements and growth," he added.

The cloud is driving new business models in the enterprise, forcing IT departments and service providers to adjust in the face of changing demands and increased competition. Wikibon co-founder and chief analyst Dave Vellante addressed this trend at EMC World 2013, where he hosted a panel discussion featuring three prominent business and technology leaders: Sean Wedige, the CTO of Global Enterprise Solutions for Rackspace, SunGard Recovery Services’ Michael de la Torre, and Kevin Leahy of Dimension Data.

Vellante opens the session with a rundown of the cloud’s journey so far: Amazon Web Services entered the scene in 2006, and quickly gained traction among developers and SMBs. Larger organizations started paying attention to the public cloud in the aftermath of the economic recession, and the rise of shadow IT in 2010-2011 helped cement this trend as a force to be reckoned with. Vellante believes that the cloud is now entering a new phase that will be centered on deeper integration with business processes.

The way Vellante sees it, Amazon is a threat to competing providers because it’s an 800-pound gorilla that doubles as an industry innovator. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, he notes: when it comes to cloud computing one size does not fit all, and there’s plenty of whitespace left to fill. Rackspace’s Sean Wedige agrees with Vellante’s assessments and adds that CIOs have started making big bets on the cloud. There’s no denying that Amazon is the elephant in the room, but OpenStack has emerged as a challenger that gives organizations more choices in terms of security and control. From a services perspective, buyers are spending more time – and money – identifying solutions that fit into their use cases.

De la Torre takes over and explains how the public cloud affected his company. He tells the audience that SunGard leverages the technology to provide disaster recovery to customers around the world, a task it could not accomplish in the past off its five data centers.
Dimension Data general manager Kevin Leahy says it’s all about integration. Companies that rely on multiple platforms and services tend to manage their solutions as isolated projects, but this is starting to change. He says that customers are seeking out service providers to help them define polices, and help them enforce these polices across a consistent automated stack that spans private, public and hybrid clouds, as well as multiple geographical locations.

Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited, the state-run telecom operator is targeting a 25 percent growth from its enterprise business during this financial year. “We are quite bullish about the opportunity. We have already earned INR 4,000 crore of enterprise revenues during last year and aspire to clock a healthy 25 percent growth this fiscal,” says RK Upadhyay, Chairman and Managing Director, BSNL.

The company has partnered with Dimension Data, a global ICT solutions and services provider to launch their Enterprise Cloud Services in India.  

Last year, the telco had launched its Internet Data Centres (BSNL IDC) in partnership with Dimension Data in Mumbai, Faridabad, Ahmedabad, Jaipur, Ludhiana and Ghaziabad. Based on Dimension Data's Managed Cloud Platform (MCP), BSNL's enterprise cloud services will be provided via its Internet data centres.

Under the partnership Dimension Data has signed a ten years agreement with BSNL and is investing a total of Rs 200 crore that includes building six datacenters and offering cloud services. The revenues will be shared jointly. Dimension Data will leverage BSNL’s physical infrastructure and enterprise wing capabilities.

In order to centralize its operations in the country, BSNL has undertaken an enterprise resource-planning (ERP) project.

“We have already signed up 15 clients, which indicate the value we bring it to the table. Our flexible sourcing options will help the simply host their entire IT assets within our secure environment that will be taken care by experts,” Upadhyay adds.

BSNL says that around 15 percent capacity of the datacenters is occupied within a year and by 2013-14, 50 percent of the capacity will be engaged.

However, BSNL faces some challenges in making headway in the enterprise space. The company is unable to provide connectivity in Delhi and Mumbai, which are the main business hubs. It has to collaborate with its sister telco - Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Limited to do so. Secondly, it was slightly behind other private telcos in realizing the potential of the enterprise segment. Most of the private companies like Bharti Airtel, Vodafone, Reliance Communications started focusing on the enterprise space once their revenues from the traditional business started to fall.

 –Jatinder Singh, Principal Correspondent, Light Reading India

State-run telecom operator Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) and IT solutions provider Dimension Data on Tuesday entered into a new partnership to launch enterprise cloud services in India.

BSNL will render the enterprise cloud services via Internet data centres. The services will be based on Dimension Data's Managed Cloud Platform (MCP). The new partnership has signed up 15 enterprises across government, IT / ITES, Education and Financial Services. Dimension Data's MCP provides enterprise-ready, offering multiple layers of security, administrative controls, highest availability SLAs, 24/7 phone support and integrated management capabilities.

 "The IDC and cloud services have not only enabled us to build and add new strategic capabilities to our portfolio, but also, it has benefited our clients who can leverage our flexible sourcing options or simply host their entire IT assets within our secure environment and with expert care," said RK Upadhyay, chairman and managing director, BSNL.

He also added that BSNL is in a tryst to notch the top position in the market and with the expansion of next phase BSN would be able to achieve this.

"We are currently expanding our network by around 15 million lines which is called phase 7 of network expansion. In the next round of expansion, which will be phase 8, we will give real push to be number 1 in the industry," said RK Upadhyay.

Kapil Sibal , minister of communications and IT, who presided over the launch said, "With the central as well as state governments strategically investing in strengthening their e-governance initiatives to benefit citizens, this public-private partnership to offer cloud services is another step towards realising the larger goal of bridging the gap between citizens and the government."

To contact the editor, e-mail: editor@ibtimes.com

Telecom operatorBharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) andDimension Data, a global ICT solutions and services provider, today jointly announced the launch of their enterprise cloud services in India. Based on Dimension Data's Managed Cloud Platform (MCP), BSNL's enterprise cloud services will be rendered via its internet datacentres. The launch was presided over by Minister for Communications and IT KapilSibal.

Based on a standardised architecture, the MCP offers enterprises the advantage of being able to support public, private and hybrid cloud models. All MCPs are enterprise-ready, offering multiple layers of security, administrative controls, highest availability SLAs, 24/7 phone support and integrated management capabilities. 

Made especially for large enterprise, these services have been acknowledged as 'leaders' in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Cloud IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service), and have more than 1,000 clients globally. 

RK Upadhyay, chairman and managing director, BSNL, said "The IDC and cloud services have not only enabled us to build and add new strategic capabilities to our portfolio, but also, it has benefited our clients who can leverage our flexible sourcing options or simply host their entire IT assets within our secure environment and with expert care." 

Commending the launch of BSNL's cloud services, Sibal said, "With the central as well as state governments strategically investing in strengthening their e-governance initiatives to benefit citizens, this public-private partnership to offer cloud services is another step towards realising the larger goal of bridging the gap between citizens and the government."

Cloud services provider Dimension Data announced on Tuesday it has partnered with IT services provider Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited to launch enterprise cloud services in India.

The move comes a few weeks after Dimension Data introduced WAN optimization to its managed cloud platform.

Dimension Data is investing $35.7 million, while BSNL will be providing the physical assets. The cloud service is built with standardized architecture, and is based on a managed cloud platform.

BSNL chairman and managing director R.K. Upadhayay says that Dimension Data and BSNL have commissioned nine data centers throughout India.

“We have robust communications and IT infrastructure in the country with 38,000 digital telephone exchanges,” says Upadhayay , adding that BSNL was supplementing government’s mission to bridge digital divide to facilitate citizen services.

The partnership is designed to bring cloud services to large enterprises and small and medium-sized businesses with limited budget. The 10-year contract, which also has a built-in extension clause, will see the two companies work toward a common go-to market strategy.

“The partnership is based on revenue-sharing model. The Union and state governments can leverage cloud services to roll out e-Governance services,” said BSNL CFA director, N.K. Gupta. The standardized cloud architecture, Gupta added, would offer several benefits, including interoperability.

Dimension Data CEO Kiran Bhagwanani said the cloud computing initiative would provide Indian enterprises with managed colocation, web hosting and IT services.

The partnership has already attracted15 large enterprises across government and private sectors.

Dimension Data recently launched its new cloud readiness service designed to help organizations assess their ability and preparedness for migrating applications to the cloud.

India’s state owned telco Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) and Dimension Data, an ICT solutions and services firm have launched enterprise cloud services in India.

With this BSNL has made debut BSNL into the enterprise cloud services space through its Internet Data Centres (IDCs) on Dimension Data’s Managed Cloud Platform (MCP).

Kiran Bhagwanani, CEO, Dimension Data India said that India is a key market for Dimension Data and the company continue to make significant investments here.

This public-private collaboration has signed on 15 user enterprises across Financial Services, IT / ITES, Education and Government sectors.

Based on a standardised architecture, the MCP offers enterprises the advantage of being able to support public, private and hybrid cloud models. All MCPs are enterprise-ready, offering multiple layers of security, administrative controls, highest availability SLAs, 24/7 phone support and integrated management capabilities.

Specifically architected for Large Enterprise needs, these services have already been acknowledged as ‘Leaders’ in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Cloud IaaS, and have more than 1,000 clients globally.

Kapil Sibal, Minister of Communications and IT who was present on the launch said that  said, with the central, as well as State governments strategically investing in strengthening their E-Governance initiatives to benefit citizens, this public-private partnership to offer cloud services is another step towards realising the larger goal of bridging the gap between citizens and the government.”

R. K. Upadhyay, Chairman & Managing Director, BSNL, said  “The IDC and Cloud Services have not only enabled us to build and add new strategic capabilities to our portfolio, but also, it has benefited our clients who can leverage our flexible sourcing options or simply host their entire IT assets within our secure environment and with expert care. The fact that we have already signed on 15 leading organizations is a clear indicator of the value we are delivering.”

Recent developments have revealed that Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited or BSNL, a state-owned operator has joined hands with Dimension Data, an ICT solution and service provider for introducing enterprise cloud services in India. It is said to be based on Managed Cloud Platform.

Details regarding the collaboration have come to the fore and it has been revealed that Dimension Data will be the one who will be making the investment for the said service. This company has put in around Rs 200 crore and BSNL is responsible for contributing physical assets which include space and power. According to R. K. Upadhayay the chairman and managing director of the government-owned firm, it has already commissioned as many as 9 data centers located across the nation.

The chairman also mentions that this initiative has been kicked off for the benefit of the people of the country. While it will prove to be of help to large enterprises, small businesses with financial limitations can also rely on it. And apart from this, the new offering will even assist the government itself. The union and state administration have the option of making use of this cloud service to ensure efficient e-governance.

Moreover, the BSNL CFA director, N.K. Gupta has revealed that this standardized cloud architecture brings its own set of benefits, interoperability being one of them. The involved companies have signed an agreement for a span of 10 years for now, but they may extend it in the future. They are currently focusing their attention towards formulating a market strategy for their new venture. Also, we understand that the basis of this particular partnership is a revenue-sharing model.

The state-owned company boasts of robust communication networks as well as a strong IT infrastructure. It has as many as 38,000 digital telephone exchanges that are spread across India. This network provider seems to have pinned down its hopes on this cloud service as it is aiming towards achieving a pretty ambitious 25 percent growth in the enterprise business during this fiscal year itself.

As for the guys over at Dimension Data, they believe that in addition to cloud computing, the new initiative is likely to tag along a number of other things such as managed collocation, hosting and IT services. Customers can expect it to take care of cost and risk optimizations as well.

As many as 15 companies have already collaborated with BSNL and Dimension Data for their cloud computing services.

Gen-i and Dimension Data led the pack at Microsoft’s 2012 New Zealand Partner Awards, winning three awards each, with PC Media taking out the hotly contested new category on cloud computing.

“We are thrilled to recognise a number of our partners who have achieved amazing business outcomes this year. We added a new category in recognition of the great things our partners are doing in cloud computing and cloud-based solutions also featured highly in the other categories,” says Microsoft’s Director of Small, Midmarket Solutions and Partner Division, Chris Ichter.

“The entry calibre was exceptional and it was sometimes hard to pick a winner, resulting in us having two categories with joint winners. We have more than 3000 partners and this is one way we are able to thank them for the great work they do.”

Joint winners, Gen-i and Hewlett-Packard, were Communications Partners of the Year and Gen-i also took top place in the Devices and Deployment category while Gen-i’s David McFarlane-Smith won Solutions Architect of the Year.

Dimension Data also led the pack, similarly picking up three of the first place awards for Server Platform Partner of the Year, Management and Visualisation Partner of the Year and Innovative Technology for Good Citizenship Partner of the Year. The judges found the social impact of its work with the Prison Fellowship on an Angel Tree giving program to be particularly admirable. Dimension Data was also a finalist for Communications Partner of the Year.

Datacom received multiple honors, earning first place for Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Partner of the Year for impressive customer satisfaction, a slick user interface and specialisation into the FMCG vertical. As well as being a finalist for Cloud Partner of the Year, it also took a finalist position in the Windows 8 App Developer Partner of the Year behind NV Interactive which was honored at the Global Partner Awards in 2012. Datacom was also a finalist for Management and Virtualisation Partner of the Year.

Gen-i and Dimension Data led the pack at Microsoft’s 2012 New Zealand Partner Awards, winning three awards each, with PC Media taking out the hotly contested new category on cloud computing.

“We are thrilled to recognise a number of our partners who have achieved amazing business outcomes this year. We added a new category in recognition of the great things our partners are doing in cloud computing and cloud-based solutions also featured highly in the other categories,” says Microsoft’s Director of Small, Midmarket Solutions and Partner Division, Chris Ichter.

“The entry calibre was exceptional and it was sometimes hard to pick a winner, resulting in us having two categories with joint winners. We have more than 3000 partners and this is one way we are able to thank them for the great work they do.”

Joint winners, Gen-i and Hewlett-Packard, were Communications Partners of the Year and Gen-i also took top place in the Devices and Deployment category while Gen-i’s David McFarlane-Smith won Solutions Architect of the Year.

Dimension Data also led the pack, similarly picking up three of the first place awards for Server Platform Partner of the Year, Management and Visualisation Partner of the Year and Innovative Technology for Good Citizenship Partner of the Year. The judges found the social impact of its work with the Prison Fellowship on an Angel Tree giving program to be particularly admirable. Dimension Data was also a finalist for Communications Partner of the Year.

Datacom received multiple honors, earning first place for Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Partner of the Year for impressive customer satisfaction, a slick user interface and specialisation into the FMCG vertical. As well as being a finalist for Cloud Partner of the Year, it also took a finalist position in the Windows 8 App Developer Partner of the Year behind NV Interactive which was honored at the Global Partner Awards in 2012. Datacom was also a finalist for Management and Virtualisation Partner of the Year.

The public cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) market is booming and expected to grow by 47 percent, from $6 billion in 2012 to $9 billion in 2013, according to Gartner’s Forecast Overview: Public Cloud Services, Worldwide, 2011-2016, 4Q Update. Additionally, the overall public cloud computing market, including software-as-a-service (SaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS), IaaS and other related services, will grow from $110 to $131 billion over the same period with a CAGR of 41.3 percent through 2016. While this projected growth is significant, cloud computing still represents less than three percent of the $3.7 trillion spent on IT per year. This begs the question, If cloud computing is so hot, why is it still just three percent of the overall IT industry?

It might be helpful to look back to when cloud IaaS was introduced to the market more than eight years ago by Amazon.com. The primary goal was to provide computing capacity at a lower cost than actual physical servers. Since then, many other cloud service providers have jumped on the bandwagon to offer low-cost, best-effort cloud services. Yet, while a market for these services clearly exists, most don’t meet the enterprise requirements for a more reliable and secure computing platform. The problem lies in the fundamental challenge that end users have in using a server-centric cloud approach to solve problems better addressed by networks.

Red Flags

Security breaches cost U.S. businesses significant amounts of time and money, and carry legal ramifications for strictly regulated financial and medical institutions. As such, it shouldn’t come as too great a surprise that it is the main concern for 71 percent of corporate technology decision makers when evaluating cloud services for business critical workloads, as reported by a recent Intel survey. The same study found that 28 percent of IT professionals have experienced a public cloud-related security breach – which, according to 65 percent of respondent companies, is a greater percentage than with traditional IT infrastructures.

One reason for the significant level of concern about cloud security might be that most providers seem to share the same server-centric approach to cloud architecture. Organizations utilizing these types of cloud environments are often unknowingly making it easier for criminals to gain access to information. When establishing vast, cloud-based data centers that are business-critical by nature, companies must institute the same level or better of perimeter security controls than what is present in privately hosted clouds.

Evaluating the various concerns around public cloud security, the network tops the list as most cloud platforms are only accessible via the network, and it has been proven to be at the core of many security breaches. However, the network is also the backbone of most organizations today. Without a strong and secure network foundation, many − if not all − will find it challenging to deliver services to the market.

Attacker access to cloud-computing platforms has become an epidemic and may need a global consortium to better educate cloud providers and help reduce the problem, according to a cloud expert who leads Dimension Data's global cloud initiatives.

Account fraud, account hijacking and the use of stolen credentials to gain criminal access to cloud-computing resources has been a longstanding issue, which is becoming a serious problem that impacts all cloud providers, said John Rowell, formerly chief technology officer at cloud provider OpSource, who now leads global research and development, and service operations in Dimension Data's Cloud Solutions Business Unit. Rowell said his firm works constantly to weed out fraudulent accounts and address the issue, but other providers may lack the desire or the wherewithal to deal with the problem.

"It's something the industry, in general as a group, and especially cloud providers, need to come together and start to talk about," Rowell told CRN. "We are giving these end users -- if you are not careful and not policing your fraudulent accounts and policing who is signing up for your systems -- we are giving them the platform to launch their attacks."

The 2013 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report found configuration weaknesses, software vulnerabilities and stolen account credentials consistently being used by attackers across the board. Financially motivated cybercriminal gangs that conduct smash-and-grab attacks to steal credit cards; hacktivists out to disrupt and embarrass businesses; and nation-state-driven attackers who steal intellectual property use stolen credentials, and often leverage the resources of cloud-hosting providers to direct their attack campaigns and upload and temporarily store stolen data.

"It's a real problem that is only going to get worse," Rowell said. "Cloud computing has enabled these guys to launch significant attacks with not much investment."

In this interview with CRN, Rowell addresses the impact that distributed denial of service attacks are having on the industry; he explains why cybercrime is driving Dimension Data to roll out two-factor authentication support globally and talks about how global expansion into emerging markets has made network availability a constant problem.

Cost savings, convenience, speed-to-market and freedom from technology lock-ins are all benefits of migrating business applications to the cloud, and many that have already adopted cloud strategies have indeed realised significant cost savings and productivity gains.

However, some have also experienced performance and availability issues that have led to resistance to migrating business-critical functions. As a result, the bulk of successful cloud projects to date have been departmental and not ‘mission critical’ core systems which have significant requirements for resource-intensive functions such as database replication, file synchronisation, backup and disaster recovery between data centres.

Part of the problem is that the public cloud ‘Infrastructure as a Service’ (IaaS) market is evolving more slowly than other areas such as ‘Software as a Service’ (SaaS). Providers are only beginning to recognise the level to which performance levels need to be increased and the capabilities their offerings need to make them a viable platform for mission critical purposes.

One area of IaaS that providers have quickly evolved is services that support wide area networks (WAN). The WAN is fundamental to any globally connected service offering, dictating data transfer performance between locations. WAN performance optimisation therefore needs to be embedded as part of the cloud infrastructure. By optimising bandwidth and latency times, WAN managers can tune performance and efficiency so that data transfer times are improved and service levels to users are met consistently.

In some situations, WAN optimisation can be achieved by user organisations installing their own virtual client. However, it is far more efficient for the service provider to carry out WAN optimisation between cloud data centres, transparently accelerating traffic for enterprise users. By integrating WAN optimisation into the cloud platform on a global scale, the speed of transfer between locations can be optimised for the WAN as a whole so that resources and bandwidth are deployed where need is greatest and thus overall efficiency is best delivered. Dramatic additional improvements in performance can be achieved by controlling compression and caching within network protocols (e.g., TCP, UDP, CIFS, NFS, MAPI, HTTP, HTTPS, MS-SQL) and databases accessed across the network.

Once organisations are confident that they can optimise the performance of the WAN that interconnects cloud-based applications and data, they can start to migrate mission critical data and applications to the cloud.

Service Level Agreements (SLAs) for infrastructures are generally very demanding for mission critical applications – particularly where they govern up-time, response time and latency performance. And as more resource intensive, mission critical applications make use of IaaS and other cloud offerings, so WAN optimisation becomes a key part of meeting SLAs for performance and availability. As a result, when evaluating cloud services, most prospective purchasers for mission-critical projects will expect core WAN optimisation to be a part of the cloud service and not provided as an add-on with an additional charge.

The use of cloud technologies and services will continue to evolve and take-up will continue to expand. However, for mission critical enterprise-wide applications, WAN performance is a critical issue, and cloud offerings that integrate WAN optimisation capabilities directly into the service will quickly position themselves ahead of less sophisticated IaaS offerings. While those services may sometimes appear to carry a higher initial cost, the performance gains and bandwidth savings that they offer will quickly reduce the overall cost of IT infrastructure.

Desktone, desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) provider, is looking to enable cloud services providers with customers that want the flexibility and cost savings of the cloud but also the control of traditional on-premise IT environments. The new cloud-managed virtual desktop solution enables SMBs and enterprises to develop a cloud model that best suits their business needs, whether it's public, private or hybrid.

Additionally, the desktop virtualization offering also enables choice in desktop options, including Microsoft RDS, VDI and Remote Apps. According to Desktone, this should eliminate the barriers associated with traditional VDI deployments.

"Cloud-hosted virtual desktops offer great benefits, but not everyone is ready or willing to go 100 percent hosted. Some businesses want to leverage the capacity of their own private infrastructure-as-a-service environment or retain more control by keeping hardware on-premises. Others want a hybrid model, where certain offices are fully cloud-hosted and others are cloud-managed. These companies and service providers have been asking Desktone for a solution," said Peter McKay, CEO of Desktone, in a prepared statement.

As our sister site MSPmentor noted, the new solution gives managed service providers new options for delivering virtual desktop offerings to end-customers. With the appliance, service providers will not only be able to make margin off of the hardware sale (off of a price tag of $10,000 to $12,000), but because it's a hosted service, the provider will also gain recurring revenue throughout the life of the subscription.

Desktone has released two configurations of the product -- one for enterprises and one for SMBs and branch offices. Enterprises are able to use existing private cloud IaaS environments or use the Desktone blueprint, which includes a choice of server hardware from NetApp and EMC, as well as desktop virtualization software. The SMB/branch office version can be deployed as a pre-configured virtual desktop appliance that includes GreenByte's vIO virtual storage and compute and desktop virtualization software.

The cloud-managed virtual desktop offerings are now available through authorized Desktone service providers. It's also available from cloud provider partners like Dell, Fujitsu, Time Warner Cable and Dimension Data.

Dimension Data CEO Brett Dawson Tuesday laid out an ambitious plan for the global systems integration giant to double its sales over the next five years to $12 billion.

The South African-headquartered systems integrator is in the midst of a cloud-computing service offensive: doubling down on providing its own Dimension Data-branded IT service offerings. Just last week, the SP500 powerhouse acquired Australian managed security services provider Earthwave, Corp.

"As we go forward in the next five to 10 years, we are going to have to provide a lot more [IT-as-a-service] platforms, a lot more infrastructure ourselves," said Dawson in a keynote address at the Dimension Data 2013 Perspectives analyst conference in Cambridge, Mass.

[Related: Dimension Data Joins Amazon, Rackspace With Three-Tiered Cloud Storage]

"Customers are searching for a different model," said Dawson, speaking about the increasing demand for cloud-computing service offerings combined with traditional on-premise infrastructure. "The old model of owning and running the whole data center is just not where they want to be."

One big advantage as Dimension Data expands its cloud-computing services footprint: the financial muscle of its parent corporation, Japanese telecommunications giant NTT, the $133 billion global powerhouse that was ranked as the 29th largest company in the world by Fortune. NTT acquired Dimension Data nearly three years ago.

"In the future as things move more toward IT as a service, we are going to have to put a lot of that CapEx [capital expenditure] in place [to build out cloud service infrastructure]," said Dawson. "We are going to have to run that. That is going to take cash. That is going to take a big investment. NTT brought a lot of that to the table. I think that culture sets us apart."

Dimension Data, in fact, is considered one of the leaders in the race among system integrators to deliver a new era of next-generation cloud services. At the same time, Dawson said, Dimension Data is leveraging its systems integration legacy as a "key differentiator."

Dimension Data says the acquisition extends and strengthens its managed security services, and supports its growth in the cloud services, IT outsourcing and enterprise mobility. “The acquisition provides us with access to intellectual property, technology and processes that we can immediately apply to our services practice here in Australia, while further strengthening our global threat intelligence and security services,” said Rodd Cunico, CEO for Dimension Data Australia.

“While organisations increasingly recognise outsourcing, cloud services and enterprise mobility as enablers for innovation and transformation, security concerns are one of the major inhibitors to the adoption of these services. At the same time, cyber threats from individuals through to state-sponsored groups continue to rise,” said Cunico.

Earthwave is a privately owned Australian company founded in 2000, with two Sydney-based security operations centres (SOCs). It is a managed security services provider (MSSP) that specialises in network security management.

In 2010 earthwave received a ‘Strong Positive’ - the highest possible rating - in Gartner’s MarketScope for Managed Security Services in the Asia/Pacific Region, and has maintained this ranking for three consecutive years.

Dimension Data, now owned by Japanese telco giant NTT, has been on a buying spree in Australia in recent years, with the acquisitions of Bellerephon, BlueFire and Netforce. The value of the earthwave acquisition has not been disclosed.

Earthwave provides on-premise and cloud-based services, including managed security service, secure Internet gateway, cloud security and professional security services. It specialises in secure operations centre enablement, from architecture operational management and SOC augmentation services. “Earthwave offers a set of complementary security services to Dimension Data – in fact, we have been working in partnership for more than ten years. So this was a natural step for us to take,” said Cunico.

Cunico said Dimension Data has an established security business with more than 15 years’ experience, covering managed services, consulting and professional services. “With the earthwave acquisition, we now have a team of 160 in our Australian security business.

“While Dimension Data’s focus is on organic growth, we always evaluate the option of ‘build versus buy’. Based on the demands of our clients, we had a clear requirement to extend our security capabilities,” said Cunico. “In the case of earthwave, the time and cost required for Dimension Data to achieve the security certifications required to extend the scope of our services made this acquisition a logical choice.

The earthwave SOC is certified to the levels of ISO/IEC 27001:2005 (data centre is 27001 certified), DSD Highly Protected Gateway, PCI DSS, Cisco MSCP and ASIO-T4. Earthwave’s operational systems and processes comply with the Australian Government Information Security Manual, the standard which governs the security of government ICT systems (formerly known as ASCI 33) and is certified in ISO9001 Quality Management Systems.

Desktop-as-a-service provider Desktone is introducing a new DaaS appliance designed to help bandwidth-constrained organizations implement DaaS on premise. While Desktone’s previous offerings the on-premise cloud-managed virtual desktop solution resides on the customer site, but is remotely managed by a cloud provider, giving customers more flexibility for public, private or hybrid clouds.

“Some customers are not ready to give up control,” Dave Grant, VP of marketing at the venture capital-backed six-year-old Desktone told me. “Or maybe there are technical barriers or bandwidth barriers. For all those reasons we felt that we wanted to deliver another option for them. “

New DaaS Delivery and Revenue Options

The new solution gives managed service providers some new options when it comes to delivering virtual desktops to end-customer organizations. For instance, MSPs can make a commission on the initial hardware sale of the appliance, and then receive recurring revenue from the sale of services. The price tag for the appliance will come to about $10,000 to $12,000, and the appliance will include the basic software required. The device will support about 100 users on Windows 7.

Retail Prices and MSP Margins for Desktone's DaaS

Grant says in the end the retail price per user ends up at about $30 per user per month and MSPs can upsell various software and services (for instance, help desk)  and charge a retail price of $50 to $55 per user per month. Grant says these prices already incorporate a 30 percent margin for the MSP.

Grant told me that Desktone has seen interest grow in DaaS services recently. Drivers such as looming deadline for end to support for Windows XP and the growing bring-your-own-device movement have encouraged organizations to reconsider their traditional approach to client computing.

Some organizations are looking at repurposing old hardware or investing in thin clients, Grant told me.

Dimension Data appears to be on a cloud computing collission course with Amazon (NSDQ:AMZN) Rackspace (NYSE: RAX). The reason: Dimension Data is introducing a tiered storage options capability, which will be part of the company's public compute-as-a-service (CaaS) offering.

The company's offering is based on the EMC (NYSE: EMC) VNX storage platform, which provides a unified storage platform for virtual applications in the cloud. Options can be selected and provisioned through a web-based user interface or API. To accelerate performance, the company leverages solid state drives (SSD).

"Providing additional options around storage media is an important innovation that enables our clients to leverage the cloud for a variety of applications including high performance databases as well as less demanding applications such as archiving, backup and long term data retention," said Dimension Data Cloud Services General Manager Dave Hanrahan in a prepared statement.

Pricing is based on the level of performance desired. Tier 3 starts at 0.01 cents per GB of data per hour; Tier 2 starts at 0.03 cents per GB of data per hour; and Tier 3 starts at 0.06 cents per GB of data per hour.

The offering is available to clients of Dimension Data Managed Cloud Platforms (MCPs) in the United States West Coast, Australia, and Europe, and will be rolled out to other public CaaS environments in the coming months.

"Dimension Data is committed to providing a high performance cloud that is easy to use and customize," Hanrahan added. 

Dimension Data recently released a survey that revealed that 78 percent of IT decision-makers have both a current strategic plan and a budget for some components of a unified communications and collaboration system (UCC).

ICT services provider Dimension Data has introduced tiered storage options as part of its public Compute-as-a-Service (CaaS) offering. Public cloud clients can now access three tiers of block-based storage at USD 0.07 to 0.44 per GB per month. The service is based on EMC's VNX storage platform and Dimension Data will offer High-Performance, Standard, and Economy tiers.

Adobe has assured its swing to the Cloud won't impact its channel or retail relationships.

Adobe announced upgrades to its Creative Cloud technology and ditching future boxed versions of its Creative Suite 6 software products, which will continue to be supported and available for purchase.

Adobe A/NZ managing director, Paul Robson, said it won't be disengaging its retail partners such as JB Hi-Fi and Harvey Norman. He explained that instead of customers buying boxed versions of its software, they can purchase individual products from the Creative Cloud through point of sale activation cards.

Australian customers will be charged at the same rate as US customers, currently paying $49.99 per month for the full product suite or $600 per year.

"The feedback we've had from our retailers has been really supportive," Robson said. "It's a nominal cost for the card to be on the shelf and allows every retail partner to range all Adobe products at the same time."

There are three versions of Creative Cloud - one aimed at individuals that is sold through retail, Creative Cloud for teams aimed at SMBs, which is sold through resellers and Creative Cloud for enterprise, aimed at corporations and government sectors, provided through system integrators such as Data#3, Insight and Dimension Data.

It will be business as usual for Adobe channel partners that will continue to sell licences in the same way.

In January, Adobe announced its Value Incentive Plan offering resellers selling Creative Cloud for teams, no minimum licensing requirements, management, immediate deployment and automatic compliance.

"We've been doing a huge amount of enablement and training with partners around the country in the last couple of months," Robson said. "We've seen a strong take up of Creative Cloud technology and support for the technology refresh.

"The onus is on the vendor to bring out new technology and then we work with our partners to stimulate demand."

Global solution and services provider Dimension Data this week unveiled tiered storage capability across its global cloud, making the company one of only a handful of cloud storage providers worldwide able to offer three tiers of service.

Johannesburg, South Africa-based Dimension Data's new tiered cloud storage options for its Compute-as-a-Service offering lets customers take advantage of SLAs tailored for their applications, said Keao Caindec, CMO of the company's Cloud Solutions Business Unit.

The new three-tiered cloud storage service was unveiled at EMC World, which is being held this week in Las Vegas.

[Related: Offering A Complete Solution: Storage VAR Builds Storage Services VAR]

The new tiered cloud storage service provides block-based storage that can be migrated between the three tiers on the fly, Caindec said.

"Customers can choose the right storage for their applications," he said. "For archiving, they might chose the economy tier. But if they are running a database, maybe the high-performance tier is best."

With the new service, based on EMC's midrange VNX storage technology, Dimension Data joins Amazon (NSDQ:AMZN) and Rackspace as the only providers of cloud storage based on three tiers. Caindec said most competitors offer at most two tiers.

Kevin Leahy, group general manager of data center solutions for Dimension Data, said performance of the three tiers differ in the various mixes of SSDs, 15,000-rpm hard drives and 7,200-rpm hard drives.

Despite the fact that EMC (NYSE:EMC)'s VNX storage arrays are targeted mainly at midrange storage deployments, Dimension Data found them to be a good choice for tiered cloud storage, Leahy said.

The service requires direct-attached storage for the virtual machines a client deploys on the company's cloud-based block storage, and VNX offers the support needed now and into the foreseeable feature, he said.

"The key value here is the automation and user interface allowing clients to select appropriate tiers and then reassign them to a different tier through the life cycle of that [virtual] machine," he said. "The key to that level of automation and ease of use is exploitation of the rich storage controller in the VNX."

Pricing for the three different tiers varies according to the level of performance desired, Leahy said. The economy tier starts at 0.01 cents per GB of data per hour, or about 7 cents per GB of capacity per month. That is about 30 percent cheaper than what Amazon Web Services charges, he said.

The standard storage tier is priced at 0.03 cents per GB per hour, while the high-performance storage tier is priced at 0.06 cents per GB per hour, he said.

Dimension Data Canada announced the availability of tiered storage options as part of its public cloud offering.

The Toronto-based cloud solution provider will have three tiers of storage: high-performance, standard and economy. Pricing for each area are as follows:

• High-Performance: $0.44/GB/month
• Standard: $0.22/GB/month
• Economy: $0.07/GB/month

Dimension Data did admit that tiered storage options are currently available from cloud pioneers Amazon Web Services and Rackspace but only in two tier models or based on price/performance.

Dimension Data is claiming that its tiered storage pricing is a approximately 30 cents cheaper per GB a month than Amazon’s block-based storage. When CDN checked Amazon dropped its pricing last November to $0.12 per GB per month. However, Amazon states this price may get cheaper over time if storage needs increase.

Currently Amazon S3 Standard tiered storage price is $0.95 per GB per month.

Meanwhile at Rackspace, it’s offering cloud storage at $0.15 per GB per month or $15 a month flat rate for 100GBs.

Dimension Data’s tiered storage offering is part of the solution provider’s enterprise-class public compute-as-a-service (CaaS) plan. Public cloud clients can now access three tiers of block-based storage at $0.07 to $0.44 per GB per month, enabling businesses to increase efficiencies in the cloud and significantly reduce total storage cost by matching the level of protection, performance and accessibility of data to the storage media that best suits an application, according to the company.

This plan is based EMC’s VNX storage platform. EMC VNX Series is a high-performing unified storage platform that is optimized for virtual applications in the cloud. On VNX tiered storage options can be selected and provisioned through a Web-based user interface or API, enabling organizations to change the type of storage required for cloud servers on the fly. The new service leverages solid state drives (SSD) to accelerate performance for both the High-Performance and Standard options.

Steve Nola, Cloud Solutions Business Unit CEO at Dimension Data said Dimension Data is committed to providing a high-performance cloud that is easy to use and customize. Providing additional options around storage media is an important innovation that enables our clients to leverage the cloud for a variety of applications including high-performance databases, as well as less demanding applications such as archiving, backup and long-term data retention.

Another aspect of Dimension Data’s tiered storage options is that they will be based on the performance, availability and cost requirement for each application:

• Tier 1 – High-Performance: 600 GB 15k Drives (RAID 5);
• Tier 2 – Standard: 2TB 7200RPM (RAID 5); and
• Tier 3 – Economy: 3TB 7200RPM (RAID 5).

Tiered storage is initially available to Dimension Data Managed Cloud Platforms customers in the U.S. state of California, Australia and Europe. The service will be rolled out to other Public CaaS environments in the coming months.

Market research firm Ovum recently released a survey sponsored by Dimension Data titled "The Future of Unified Communications & Collaboration." The survey gathered data from over 1,300 businesses across the globe to reveal a renewed interest in unified communications & collaboration.

SearchUnifiedCommunication.com site editor Tessa Parmenter interviewed Ovum Principal Analyst Mike Sapien, who took the lead on the survey, to discuss the results and reasons behind why service models and attitudes around unified communications have changed.

Your most recent survey asked IT managers and those responsible for a unified communications & collaboration strategy whether they had plans to implement some, many or all aspects of UC&C in the next couple of years and whether they had budget in place to implement them. How did these responses compare to surveys you conducted in the past?

Mike Sapien: We found just over 80% have plans to implement at least some UC&C in the next two years, but interestingly enough, 78% -- almost the same percentage -- also claimed they had dedicated budget to do so. We haven't typically seen that close, tight coupling between those who say they have plans and then also claim to have an actual budget to do it, because it's very easy to say on a survey that you have a plan, but it's a different story to win the budget and execute on that plan. We seem to be in a period where there is renewed interest in unified communications & collaboration, and that interest is backed up more than ever by actual budget.

The bring-your-own-device (BYOD) momentum among businesses is now dovetailing with another trend – a shift towards more full implementations of unified communications (UC). A new survey from market research firm Ovum and systems integration and services provider Dimension Data shows that 78 percent of IT decision-makers now say they have both a current strategic plan and a budget for some components of a unified communications and collaboration system (UCC).  More importantly, enterprises are increasingly looking towards third-party managed service providers to manage on-premise  UCC solutions. Here’s a deeper look at the trends.

First, some context. Dimension Data says that one of the major focuses of the study was to understand how the rise of mobile devices was impacting UCC strategies. The study found that 40 percent of U.S. enterprises support (typically meaning providing access to corporate email) approved employee-owned smartphones and tablets while 21 percent said they support all such devices, whether vetted by the company or not.

BYOD and Unified Communications

However, there’s a disconnect. While core and newer UCC apps are generally supported on corporate-owned mobile devices, they remain unsupported on employee-owned devices. For instance, 70 percent of corporate owned devices supported instant messaging and presence while 22 percent supported it on corporate-approved and employee-owned devices and only 12 percent supported it for any employee-owned smartphone.

Other applications followed similar trends including web and video conferencing; consumer applications such as Skype, Twitter and Facebook; enterprise social software such as Yammer and WebEx Social; and cloud-based business and productivity applications such as Microsoft Office 365 and custom business applications.

“Worldwide systems integrator Dimension Data (DiData) holds a somewhat unique status among the various IT services and consulting companies focused on cloud infrastructure: Not only does it provide public and private cloud deployments for larger enterprise companies, it also collaborates closely with service providers providing software as a service (SaaS) or other cloud offerings.

That capability comes courtesy of DiData’s 2011 acquisitions of OpSource and BlueFire, which provided the foundation for the company’s cloud business unit, said Keao Caindec, chief marketing oifficer of Global Cloud Solutions for DiData. Prior to assuming that title, Caindec was senior vice president and chief marketing officer for OpSource.” READ MORE:

When Mike Fouts began his tenure, about a year and a half ago, as vice president of the Americas channels and field operations at Citrix Systems Inc., he laid out a vision for the future of the company's channel program and set several top priorities.

SearchITChannel.com recently sat down with the channel executive to talk about changes that Citrix partners have seen during Fouts' tenure. In this interview, he discusses the company's controversial move last year that effectively cut most channel partners out of large-enterprise accounts and redirected them to the SMB market, initiatives the company launched to support Citrix partners in the SMB space, and channel-related plans for 2013.

In November 2011 you laid out three specific areas of focus for 2012: to continue to equip partners with innovative resources to sell more product and be more profitable; to continue to facilitate collaboration between partners and the Citrix sales organization; and increased effort in the SMB space, including working with partners to target companies with VDI solutions. Did you meet your goals?

Mike Fouts: Coming out of 2012, I believe we accomplished much of what we set out to accomplish but not all. Regarding the profitability of our partners -- we have about 2,400 Citrix partners in the U.S. and Canada -- profits increased 8% year over year, 2011 to 2012.

One of the biggest challenges we dealt with was segmentation, or making sure that our partners are directed to the right market segment, because being in the right market segment adds more value to the partner. So, we created two segments: the SMB segment and the high-touch segment, which is the high end and focuses on a very small group of enterprise customers -- famous brand names such as Walmart or American Express, for example.

DIMENSION Data (Didata) aims to double its annual revenue to $12bn over the next five years through acquisitions and organic growth.

The company said on Friday it would post $6bn in revenue this year as a result of robust growth from its operations in Europe and Asia. The company, owned by Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT) in Japan, has seen consistent growth over the past few years thanks to the portfolio of technology solutions and services it provides to clients in 51 countries in five regions — Middle East and Africa, Europe, Asia Pacific, Australia and the Americas.

The company’s revenue for the 2012 financial year was $5.8bn.

Didata CEO Brett Dawson said the company continued to perform well in "somewhat tough markets", which was a "good achievement". The fastest growing markets for Didata were Europe, despite the tough economic environment, and Asia.

"We are gaining market share in Europe," Mr Dawson said.

Most of the growth for products and services came from data centres and data security.

Didata continued to focus on extending its portfolio of solutions such as cloud computing.

But growth in other markets, including Africa, had been slower than previously, Mr Dawson said. Africa remained an important market for the company.

Didata plans to make acquisitions to extend its global footprint, strengthen its existing operations in some markets and accelerate its entry into new technology areas. "We see ourselves expanding in emerging markets like Latin America," Mr Dawson said.

"We see opportunities for increased growth. (There were) half a dozen countries we (thinking) of going into."

Mr Dawson said Didata would aggressively push cloud-computing solutions, security and enterprise mobility — including mobile device management services — to their clients. "Cloud computing is an exciting area and it’s still in the early stages of adoption."

In January, the company signed a global partnership with AirWatch, a mobile device management and mobile security provider.

Didata was bought by NTT three years ago for about R24bn and delisted from the JSE.

In a constant effort to improve customers' cloud experience and increase adoption, cloud providers are starting to introduce WAN optimization capabilities into their service offerings. This technology will allow organizations to realize significant performance improvements for cloud applications. For providers who have global cloud ecosystems, this is an extremely important step forward. One area in particular that will benefit from WAN optimization is Recovery as a Service (RaaS), a cloud-based solution that uses predetermined sets of processes to allow enterprises to implement disaster recovery in the cloud. Traditional disaster recovery/business continuity (DR/BC) solutions, including hot sites and secondary data centers, have commonly been costly to implement, and RaaS solutions have emerged as a better alternative.

RaaS is still a fairly young technology, but coupled with the advantages of WAN optimization, could be poised for impressive growth. To date, much of the traction for RaaS has been with small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). This is mainly due to the fact that companies of this size, particularly the mid-tier businesses, have been among the most prevalent early adopters of the cloud. Many have IT infrastructures that aren't large enough to reap all of the benefits of virtualization but can still gain significant savings and operational improvements by moving to the cloud. In addition, the amount of data involved in the SMB recovery process is typically more moderate in scope, so the bandwidth requirements are manageable from a cost perspective, even with limited data reduction mechanisms. However, while RaaS can dramatically reduce the amount of data being sent to the recovery site (via block level replication, compression, de-duplication, multi-threading, network "throttling, caching), the bandwidth requirements and associated costs can still be quite substantial for larger organizations with massive amounts of data to be protected.

Dimension Data has done more in terms of investing in its growth strategy, in the two years since it was bought out by Japan-based NTT, than what may have been possible if it were still listed, says CEO Brett Dawson.

DiData was delisted at the end of 2010, after the R24.2 billion buyout by Japan-based Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation became final. Dawson says NTT has invested “heavily” in DiData and the company has been able to make a few acquisitions off the back of the investment.

Driven by agility and convenience benefits, companies around the world and across all market sectors are in some phase of moving their business applications to the cloud. Many of those that have taken the plunge have experienced significant cost savings and productivity gains; however, some have also experienced the performance and availability issues inherent in many public cloud offerings. As a result of performance concerns, organizations have delayed migrating business-critical functions to the cloud in favor of testing the waters with applications and services that are not essential to the organization.

As the public cloud IaaS market continues to evolve, providers are beginning to recognize the need to increase performance levels by adding enhanced computing capabilities to their offerings. One area that these providers have turned their attention to in particular is the wide area network (WAN). The WAN is the foundation of any globally connected cloud service offering, enabling cloud providers to speed-up the time of data transfer between locations. With WAN optimization embedded as part of the cloud provider’s infrastructure, data transfers run faster and more efficiently, delivering consistent service levels to all cloud service consumers. This helps cloud users overcome the latency and bandwidth constraints often associated with public cloud services.

While some cloud providers allow organizations to install their own virtual WAN optimization client on a virtual server to optimize traffic and performance, it is more efficient to place WAN optimization between cloud data centers to transparently accelerate traffic for enterprise users. By having WAN optimization integrated into a cloud platform on a global scale, the speed of transfer between locations is optimized, resulting in efficient throughput. Additionally, by using compression, caching and optimizing network protocols (TCP, UDP, CIFS, HTTP, HTTPS, NFS, MAPI, MS-SQL) and databases (Oracle 11i and 12i), organizations can experience a more dramatic improvement in performance.

The Internet, and indeed every business, runs on data - usually lots of it. Thanks to the proliferation of cloud-based services we discussed in the first feature in this series, that data could be all over the place, too. Keeping track of all this data, and ensuring that it is secure, is a major logistical nightmare. As we explained in an earlier feature focusing on Big Data, interlinked information and its analysis is also the next big revolution currently brewing in Web culture. In this feature we examine the issues of data growth, and look at some of the solutions available.

Reaching for the cloud store

In reality, cloud storage shouldn't be about having some documents on a service like Google Drive and others stored locally, which is clearly a recipe for confusion. It should be about having your documents appear to be in the same place all the time – on whatever machine you are currently using – but also having them seamlessly and securely stored in a remote location as well. You could, of course, standardise on just one cloud service and specify that everyone in your organisation use this for all primary document storage. But this locks you into a single vendor, which may not offer all the features you need, in particular the level of service to suit a mission-critical application. You have also moved from multiple points of failure – that is, each individual user's machine – to just one. Placing all your business storage eggs in one cloud-based basket, even if the chosen service is very reliable indeed, presents some major risks.

Dimension Data last week introduced its global Managed Cloud Platform (MCP) in Nigeria, promising that it was going to serve the needs of both public and private enterprise, as well as service providers.

Dimension Data said that it’s cloud offering will enable clients to accelerate their adoption of cloud computing, increase strategic agility, lower ICT infrastructure management expenses, and reduce cloud migration complexity and risk.

Cloud technology presents a new consumption model for ICT solutions and services wrapped in a predictable, monthly commercial model, which allows its adopters to reduce cost as cloud reduces the total cost of ownership of managing infrastructure and applications.

According to the General Manager, Enterprise Solutions, Dimension Data Nigeria, Jide Agbaje, “the availability of cloud computing in Nigeria makes it easier for organisations to harness the cost and agility benefits of Cloud as it provides organisations high speed access to secure, enterprise-class public, private, hybrid and hosted private cloud services in the country”

Meanwhile, Solutions Executive, Dimension Data Africa, Mr Tony Munro, had earlier declared that “while the benefits of cloud computing are very compelling, the complexity of planning, building and managing cloud infrastructure, is significant. Cloud providers need to address client concerns about security, compliance, integration, performance, capital expense requirements, as well as deployment and operational risks – to allow clients accelerate their Cloud journey,”

Managing Director, Dimension Data Nigeria, Mr. Graham Frank Dinwoodie, spoke with Emma Okonji on the company’s new service offerings in cloud computing, and how it intends to use the solution to drive data penetration in the country. Excerpts:

Dimension Data is introducing cloud computing services to the Nigerian market. What is cloud service all about and how can businesses benefit from it? Yes, Dimension Data is introducing cloud services to the Nigerian market to help business operate more efficiently and in a most secured way. My definition of cloud is that it is a different way of consuming Information Technology (IT) services on a pay as you go basis. It allows organisations to utilise and pay for only the applications that they need, and it makes IT business more efficient and most cost effective.

What is Dimension Data’s interest in cloud computing?

Cloud is the in thing today, but our interest in cloud service offerings was motivated by the gap we saw in what people call cloud service offering, and this gap is what we call the orchestration layer, first service layer, and automation layer. The gap calls for the ability of solution provider like Dimension Data to manage different components seamlessly within a control board that users can get those services on demand in an efficient manner. We saw the gap, and we decided to bridge the gap, and that is our interest in cloud computing. We have to acquire companies in order to bring their own expertise on board to offer complete solution in cloud computing. Today cloud computing has become a global trend. What differentiates cloud computing services from virtual services is the self-service capability and that is where the value comes in. We see the difference as an opportunity for us to come in and play very well in cloud computing.

Australia-based adventure clothing and equipment company, Kathmandu, plans on growing its business beyond the confines of Australasia and Britain, and supporting that expansion with Cloud services. And it has secured the services of Dimension Data to provide it with the technology it needs to achieve those objectives.

The ICT solutions and service provider put out a statement on Tuesday (February 26, 2013) saying Kathmandu had given them a contract to "deploy an advanced cloud service infrastructure" based on its Public Compute-as-a-Service "offering." Once fully deployed, the setup will provide Kathmandu "on-demand, self-service, pay-for-use access and control of virtual servers, storage and networking," executives at Dimension Data said.

Stressing the importance of infrastructure speed and flexibility to his organisation, Kathmandu's CIO Grant Taylor, said, "Our vision for 2013 and beyond is to make use of Dimension Data's advanced cloud services. This means we will have the ability to start projects immediately and scale easily to meet demand." He also pointed out that he had a "new customer relationship management project in the pipeline" and that he expects to run through it more quickly, smoothly and to great benefit, due to the new cloud services to come out of his new Cloud services.

DIMENSION Data announced at the end of last week that its global Managed Cloud Platform (MCP) is now available in Nigeria to serve the needs of both public and private enterprise, as well as service providers.

Dimension Data’s cloud offering will enable clients to accelerate their adoption of cloud computing, increase strategically, lower ICT infrastructure management expenses, and reduce cloud migration complexity and risk.

Cloud technology presents a new consumption model for ICT solutions and services wrapped in a predictable, monthly commercial model, which allows its adopters to reduce cost as cloud reduces the total cost of ownership of managing infrastructure and applications.

“The availability of cloud computing in Nigeria makes it easier for organisations to harness the cost and agility benefits of Cloud as it provides organisations high speed access to secure, enterprise-class public, private, hybrid and hosted private cloud services in the country”,explains Jide Agbaje, General Manager, Enterprise Solutions, Dimension Data Nigeria.

“While the benefits of cloud computing are very compelling, the complexity of planning, building and managing cloud infrastructure, is significant. Cloud providers need to address client concerns about security, compliance, integration, performance, capital expense requirements, as well as deployment and operational risks – to allow clients accelerate their Cloud journey,” says Tony Munro, Solutions Executive,Dimension Data Africa.

The company’s publiccloud services are available immediately and dedicated private Cloud services canbe deployed in a matter ofweeks, allowing clients to enjoy the benefits of a fully automated Cloud architecture, without the risks or excessive time associated with building the architectures themselves.

Dimension Data has declared that its global Managed Cloud Platform (MCP) is now available in Nigeria to serve the needs of both public and private enterprise, as well as service providers. The technology company said the new service offerings enable organisations to embrace cloud models quickly, securely and cost-effectively. The firm’s cloud offering will enable clients to accelerate their adoption of cloud computing, increase strategic agility, lower Information Communications Technology (ICT) infrastructure management expenses, and reduce cloud migration complexity and risk.

Cloud technology presents a new consumption model for ICT solutions and services wrapped in a predictable, monthly commercial model, which allows its adopters to reduce cost as cloud reduces the total cost of ownership (TCO) of managing infrastructure and applications. “The availability of cloud computing in Nigeria makes it easier for organisations to harness the cost and agility benefits of Cloud as it provides organisations high speed access to secure, enterprise-class public, private, hybrid and hosted private cloud services in the country”,explained Jide Agbaje, General Manager, Enterprise Solutions, Dimension Data Nigeria.

“While the benefits of cloud computing are very compelling, the complexity of planning, building and managing cloud infrastructure, is significant. Cloud providers need to address client concerns about security, compliance, integration, performance, capital expense requirements, as well as deployment and operational risks – to allow clients accelerate their Cloud journey,” said Tony Munro, Solutions Executive, Dimension Data Africa.

Dimension Data is accelerating its global Managed Cloud Platform (MCP) in Nigeria to serve the needs of public and private enterprise as well as service providers. Dimension Data's cloud offering will enable clients to accelerate their adoption of cloud computing, increase strategic agility, lower ICT infrastructure management expenses, and reduce cloud migration complexity and risk.

Cloud technology presents a new consumption model for ICT solutions and services wrapped in a predictable, monthly commercial model, which allows its adopters to reduce cost as cloud reduces the total cost of ownership of managing infrastructure and applications.

"The availability of cloud computing in Nigeria makes it easier for organisations to harness the cost and agility benefits of cloud as it provides organisations high speed access to secure, enterprise-class public, private, hybrid and hosted private cloud services in the country,"JideAgbaje, general manager: Enterprise Solutions, Dimension Data Nigeria, has said.

"While the benefits of cloud computing are very compelling, the complexity of planning, building and managing cloud infrastructure, is significant cloud providers need to address client concerns about security, compliance, integration, performance, capital expense requirements as well as deployment and operational risks - to allow clients accelerate their Cloud journey," says Tony Munro, solutions executive, Dimension Data Africa.

Managed services have become a highly demanded service for outsourcing day-to-day IT management responsibilities as a way for improving operations. Companies can use these services for everything including business-to-business integration, network management, user management, information services, and communication services.

Due to the high popularity of Microsoft Lync, Peter Menadue, Dimension Data’s general manager for Microsoft Solutions, said it’s essential that the company provides its clients with lync capability.

News from the cloud computing sector includes developments from Dell and Wipro, Dimension Data and CA Technologies:

CA rolls out CloudMinder update. CA Technologies (CA) announced the next rollout of its CA CloudMinder identity and access management (IAM) service solution. CloudMinder provides enterprise-grade IAM for both cloud-based or on-premise applications. New capabilities in the release include support for social identities – with support for OpenID, OAuth, WS-Fed and SAML, extended support for On Premise and Cloud applications, and support for customer choice in how they support their IAM needs on the operational back end. CloudMinder also presents a variety of opportunities for partners, including hosting the CA CloudMinder service operations in their own data center and / or managing the IAM administration on behalf of the customer in its tenant environment. “Identity and access management demands are evolving as organizations employ different ways to save money and grow the business, such as incorporating cloud services, adopting bring-your-own-device policies and supporting social identities as a way to get closer to the customer,” said Mike Denning, general manager, Security business at CA Technologies. “This evolution and customer demand drove our vision for CA CloudMinder to be able to function as that single bridge that manages the identities and access for employees, partners and customers to cloud or on-premise applications no matter what device or what identity they chose to use.”

Dimension Data has deployed WAN optimization technology in several of its key strategic data centres. The fact that the company is not charging for the service is compelling, and the move should improve take-up of its public cloud services.

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Dimension Data announced it has introduced WAN optimization capabilities to its cloud globally.

According to Dimension Data, by deploying WAN optimization technology the Managed Cloud Platform (or MCP) cloud data centres, increases in application performance across the entire cloud are possible. Organizations can use this for database replication, file synchronization, and backup and disaster recovery between data centres.

An enhanced capability, WAN optimization is provided as part of the company's standard public cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offering at no additional charge. Dimension Data has implemented WAN optimization controller (WOC) appliances in its MCPs in San Jose, Calif. and Ashburn, Va., U.S.; Amsterdam, The Netherlands; Sydney, Australia; and Johannesburg, South Africa. Traffic moving between these sites is encrypted over a VPN tunnel and optimized for delivery using de-duplication and application-specific protocol optimization.

Steve Nola, CEO of Dimension Data's Cloud Solutions Business Unit, said the addition of WAN optimization capabilities is helping clients overcome the latency and bandwidth constraints often associated with public cloud services.

“No other cloud provider offers a core that is optimized for acceleration. By providing optimal network and cloud performance, in addition to flexibility and ease of use, we provide organizations the ability to speed the process of migrating their data and applications to the cloud,” said Nola.

Cloud services provider Dimension Data announced on Tuesday that it has introduced WAN optimization to its Managed Cloud Platform.

Dimension Data says that since the deployment of WAN optimization technology across its cloud, clients have reported a significant increase in application performance. Customers using Dimension Data’s cloud for database replication, file synchronization, and backup and disaster recovery between data centers have seen the greatest improvement in performance.

WAN optimization is included as part of Dimension Data’s standard public cloud infrastructure as a service offering at no additional charge.

Dimension Data has implemented WAN optimization controller appliances in its Managed Cloud Platform data centers in San Jose, Ashburn, Amsterdam, Sydney, and Johannesburg.

Web hosts can resell Dimension Data’s cloud services, which is hosted within a data center and is comprised of cloud infrastructure and Dimension Data CloudControl cloud management system.

In The Changing Enterprise WAN in the Era of Cloud on DataCenterKnowledge, Ajit Gupta, president and CEO of Aryaka Networks says that while WOC was previously limited to the most important locations of larger enterprises “because of the combination of the high cost of acquisition and the high ongoing costs of management and maintenance, WAN optimization will increasingly become necessary in mid-market enterprises as well as in large enterprises’ smaller offices to improve user productivity and offer IT agility and lower computing costs.”

The Australian Government Information Management Office (AGIMO) has bumped up its list of suppliers for its Data Centre as a Service (DCaaS) panel to 49.

The panel is in place to provide services such as virtual desktops, servers, disaster recovery, online collaboration tools, and managed backups to government agencies. In October last year, 35 companies, including Bulletproof, Dell, HP, IBM, Macquarie Telecom, and Telstra, were put on the list. On Thursday, AGIMO announced 14 new additions to the panel.

The following companies have now been added to the panel:

• AAPT
• Aptira
• CommsNet
• CSC
• Data #3
• Dimension Data
• eBMS
• Holocentric
• Hostworks
• Link Digital
• Oriel Technologies
• PreviousNext
• Squiz Australia
• VMvault

The agency said that the number of services available to government departments and agencies was now lifted from over 900 to over 1,200.

Dimension Data, an ICT services and solutions provider, has launched several new cloud readiness services designed to help organizations assess their ability and readiness for migrating applications to the cloud.

Dimension Data’s approach addresses readiness across four critical aspects of cloud computing: business alignment, organization, infrastructure and applications.

With expertise in networking, virtualization, security, data centres, application migration, Software as a Service (SaaS) and cloud technologies, Dimension Data’s team of consultants deliver a cloud roadmap to help organisations realise the benefits of cloud computing more immediately.

“The lack of a long-term cloud strategy can result in costly re-architecture and reintegration measures down the line,” said Steve Nola, CEO of Dimension Data’s Cloud Solutions Business Unit. “Dimension Data brings a rich heritage in building multifaceted enterprise IT and hybrid cloud solutions, enabling organisations to build a cloud roadmap that preserves business agility and operational efficiencies even as their business needs evolve.”

Dubai, UAE – 28th January 2013 – To support the expanding role cloud services are playing across enterprise information technology (IT), Dimension Data, an ICT services and solutions provider, has launched several new cloud readiness services designed to help organisations assess their ability and readiness for migrating applications to the cloud. Dimension Data’s approach addresses readiness across four critical aspects of cloud computing: business alignment, organisation, infrastructure and applications. With expertise in networking, virtualisation, security, data centres, application migration, Software as a Service (SaaS) and cloud technologies, Dimension Data’s team of consultants deliver a cloud roadmap to help organisations realise the benefits of cloud computing more immediately.

“The lack of a long-term cloud strategy can result in costly re-architecture and reintegration measures down the line,” said Steve Nola, CEO of Dimension Data’s Cloud Solutions Business Unit. “Dimension Data brings a rich heritage in building multifaceted enterprise IT and hybrid cloud solutions, enabling organisations to build a cloud roadmap that preserves business agility and operational efficiencies even as their business needs evolve.”

According to Jeff Packard, Dimension Data’s Global Head of Consulting and Professional Services, “Moving to the cloud is a complex process. There are many aspects to consider such as security, application migration, internal readiness, billing, authentication, single sign-on, and integration with other applications. Even the most sophisticated IT organisations find the process of migrating to the cloud challenging. Leveraging our expertise across traditional IT and cloud services, Dimension Data now offers its clients a suite of consulting services to help them prepare for their cloud journey.”

Services and solutions provider Dimension Data yesterday announced the launch of several new cloud readiness services designed to help organisations assess their ability and readiness for migrating applications to the cloud.

Dimension Data's approach addresses readiness across four aspects of cloud computing that it feels are critical: business alignment, organisation, infrastructure and applications. With expertise in networking, virtualisation, security, data centres, application migration, Software as a Service (SaaS) and cloud technologies, Dimension Data's team of consultants deliver a cloud roadmap to help organisations realise the benefits of cloud computing more immediately.

"The lack of a long-term cloud strategy can result in costly re-architecture and reintegration measures down the line," said Steve Nola, CEO of Dimension Data's Cloud Solutions Business Unit. "Dimension Data brings a rich heritage in building multifaceted enterprise IT and hybrid cloud solutions, enabling organisations to build a cloud roadmap that preserves business agility and operational efficiencies even as their business needs evolve."

According to Jeff Packard, Dimension Data's global head of Consulting and Professional Services, "Moving to the cloud is a complex process. There are many aspects to consider such as security, application migration, internal readiness, billing, authentication, single sign-on, and integration with other applications. Even the most sophisticated IT organisations find the process of migrating to the cloud challenging. Leveraging our expertise across traditional IT and cloud services, Dimension Data now offers its clients a suite of consulting services to help them prepare for their cloud journey."

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Software as a Service ( SaaS (News - Alert) ) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) are three examples of service models for the cloud that enable businesses to gain on-demand network access to resources and assets. Dimension Data (News - Alert) , a specialist IT services and solution provider that helps clients plan, build, support and manage their IT infrastructures, recently unveiled a new managed services offering aimed at moving hard-to-manage IT maintenance agreements into the cloud. Its approach addresses readiness across four critical aspects of cloud computing: business alignment, organization, infrastructure and applications.

The new offering for the first time provides the system integrator’s 6,000 clients worldwide with a proactive, multivendor managed services offering that replaces standalone IT break/fix support maintenance agreements. Clients now have the option to buy a single Dimension Data “Global Uptime” managed services offering that includes cloud-based IT asset tracking with proactive, uptime monitoring from a smartphone or tablet.

Global ICT services provider Dimension Data has launched several a cloud readiness service designed to help organisations assess their ability and readiness for migrating applications to the cloud. Dimension Data's approach addresses readiness across four aspects of cloud computing: business alignment, organisation, infrastructure, and application. The cloud readiness service comprises four elements: a self-assessment, a workshop, a cloud readiness assessment, and a cloud total cost of ownership.

Dimension Data made a series of cloud service announcements focused on cloud migration.

The company launched a new cloud readiness service designed to address four critical aspects of cloud computing: business alignment, organization, infrastructure, and applications. The service will provide a holistic view of where clients stand in the cloud deployment cycle; and a roadmap to help them realize cloud benefits for the long-term.

On Monday, Dimension Data announced a membership in the Riverbed Authorized Support Partner Program (RASP). There are only a few RASP solution providers in the world today. With RASP, Dimension Data can now provide support services for clients optimizing cloud networks and applications with Riverbed performance solutions. Also, Dimension Data's Network Optimization Assessment is based on Riverbed Cascade network performance management and enables informed network planning for cloud and other deployments.

Steve Nola, CEO of Dimension Data's Cloud Solutions Business Unit, said the lack of a long-term cloud strategy can result in costly rearchitecture and reintegration measures down the line. Dimension Data can now help organizations to build a cloud roadmap that preserves business agility and operational efficiencies even as their business needs evolve.

Global IT services outfit, Dimension Data has locally launched a new Cloud assessment program to help companies develop their Cloud strategy.

The new Cloud readiness service aims to help companies assess their ability and readiness for migrating applications to the Cloud. It will address four main areas such as business alignment, organisation, infrastructure and applications.

It features an online self-assessment; readiness workshop with DiData’s consulting and professional services team; readiness assessment and total cost of ownership.

DiData general manager of Cloud services, Dave Hanrahan, said moving to the Cloud was a complex process and many aspects needed to be considered such as security, application migration, internal readiness, billing, authentication, single sign-on and integration with other applications.

“The lack of a long-term Cloud strategy can result in costly re-architecture and reintegration measures down the line,” Hanrahan said. “Even the most sophisticated IT organisations find the process of migrating to the Cloud challenging."

He said it was witnessing a broad take-up across the market of the self-assessment capability and businesses with 500 - 2000 seats were taking up the cloud readiness workshop, and the custom consulting piece was strongly taken up within the utilities and financial sector.

South African ICT services and solutions provider, Dimension Data, announced last week that it had achieved Cisco Cloud Provider Certification with a Cisco Powered Cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) designation.

The certification is in recognition of Dimension Data’s investment in operating its data centres to offer cloud IaaS services in a multi-tenant environment to clients.

The certification process included a Cisco audit of the ICT company's Managed Cloud Platform (MCP) in order to provide the assurance the architecture fully supports the deployment of cloud services across public and private cloud environments, leveraging Cisco as the core networking technology.

Dimension Data’s public cloud services are available worldwide and can be accessed globally via their public MCPs in areas such as San Jose, California and Ashburn, Virginia in the United States, Amsterdam, Sydney and Johannesburg.

Dimension Data has announced a global partnership with Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) vendor Desktone Inc to offer cost-effective virtual desktops as a cloud service.

The agreement extends to New Zealand where Dimension Data will leverage the Desktone Virtual Desktop platform to help companies cope with rapid adoption of mobile computing and other enterprise initiatives.

“Organisations are increasingly embracing cloud computing for its flexibility, efficiency and ease of use,” says Leigh Jackson, technology manager for Dimension Data New Zealand. “At Dimension Data we’ve been aggressively building our portfolio of cloud services with solutions like Desktone's multi-tenant virtual desktop platform that help customers improve performance and lower IT costs.”

By leveraging a local cloud, Dimension Data says it can allow organisations to easily provision, deploy and scale desktops on demand without the expense and complexity of building and maintaining on-premise infrastructure.

“DaaS is outpacing onsite enterprise VDI as the simple and affordable solution to market demands for device independence and controllable IT costs,” says Peter McKay, CEO of Desktone. “With cloud-hosted virtual desktops, Dimension Data can deliver complete virtual desktops in a truly scalable cloud environment that’s easy to manage, without worrying about hardware or software costs.” 

Global specialist IT solutions and services provider, Dimension Data, has been positioned by Gartner in the Leaders Quadrant of the Magic Quadrant for Communications Outsourcing and Professional Services (COPS) 2012.

Compiled by Gartner analysts, the Magic Quadrant examined 21 vendors of IT services for business communications systems worldwide, employing two main evaluation criteria - ‘ability to execute’ and ‘completeness of vision’.

Dimension Data CEO, Brett Dawson, said the company’s positioning as a Leader in the Magic Quadrant for Communications Outsourcing and Professional Services 2012 report came on the eve of the launch of the next version of the company’s enhanced support service, Uptime.

Dawson said Uptime provided organisations with a support offering that helped them manage the full lifecycle of their IT environment and optimise IT support spend, and he claimed Dimension Data was the first systems integrator to come to market with proactive support services for multi-vendor environments.

Have you ever wondered why various venture capitalists are investing money into the software outsourcing these days? Well, the only reason and answer is cloud computing. Private cloud computing is a great way to maximize security and work efficiency from wherever you are working. In a basic sense, the process of cloud computing is much similar as compared to the concept of purchasing a land, building various infrastructures and then renting all the flats. Here, while the investor is seen bagging in the big returns, the customers are seen accessing the utility in various small payouts.

In the process of cloud computing, the provider hosts the software on the web that is then accessed easily by various customers who are known to consume the resources as a service, paying just for what they use. Major search engines such as Google and Yahoo are the famous examples of cloud computing service providers. Here are some significant benefits of dimension data cloud computing, which will help you realize why it is considered to be a win-win situation for both providers and the customers.

Next month’s FutureGov Forum Western Australia, being held Tuesday 5th February in Perth, is attracting continued industry interest – with peak agencies from WA and other states converging at this gathering.

Hosted by FutureGov Magazine, the FutureGov Forum Western Australia, is the first in a series of prestigious forums that are being rolled out in Australia and New Zealand throughout the year.

Designated cities for the FutureGov Forum series include Perth, Wellington (NZ), Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane.

The WA gathering brings together core agencies from WA, including members of the influential CIO Council. Member agencies include the Department of Treasury and Finance, Landgate, Department of Culture and Arts, WA Police, Department of Child Protection and the Department of Transport.

Senior officials are also represented from federal, state and local government agencies, as well as educational institutions. These include the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, Australian National Audit Office, CSIRO, Department of Premier and Cabinet (SA), and the Australian Maritime Safety Authority.

Dimension Data, the specialist IT solutions and services provider, announced on Wednesday that Gartner, the IT research and advisory company, had positioned it in the “Leaders Quadrant of the Magic Quadrant for Communications Outsourcing and Professional Services (COPS) 2012 report”.

The “Magic Quadrant” examined 21 vendors of IT services for business communications systems worldwide, employing two main evaluation criteria, namely ‘ability to execute’ and ‘completeness of vision’.

Brett Dawson, Dimension Data Chief Executive, said: “We are extremely proud to be positioned in the Magic Quadrant and be recognised for our ability to execute and completeness of vision.

“While providing our clients with quality services has been Dimension Data’s core business for decades, we constantly strive to further build our foundation and grow our leadership position in the ICT services market. In the last 12 months alone, Dimension Data made a number of strategic investments.”

In 2012, Dimension Data bought telecom expense management company, Xigo, to “accelerate its offerings in the managed communications space” and Dawson said after launching their Cloud Solutions Business Unit they had doubled cloud revenues as well as increasing their client base to more than 2,000.

What's In Store For 2013?

From fast growth in bring your own device (BYOD) and big data market segments to continued consolidation in the channel, SP500 top executives see a new year filled with big opportunities and big challenges. Here are 2013 predictions from 16 of the best and brightest SP500 executives.

Andy Miller joined Polycom in 2009, several months before Cisco acquired Tandberg, Logitech acquired LifeSize, and an ongoing consolidation among videoconferencing players seemed imminent. He became CEO less than a year later and began the strenuous process of not only growing Polycom but also shifting its purview -- something that hadn't changed much in the decade since Polycom bought its way into video dominance with PictureTel.

But if there's one thing Miller, a former Tandberg CEO, Cisco executive and longtime industry executive, has effected during his two years running the $1.5 billion company, it's change. Polycom today is very different than it was even a few years ago, having rebranded, refocused, re-engaged with a channel that it had all but neglected, and taken the fight in a tough market to Cisco, whose video market share has declined in the past year. Crucially, Polycom has shifted its own sales conversation from IP telephony endpoints and video infrastructure to software, services and cloud-based conferencing, all of which Miller sees as key to preserving video partner margins in the future.

Polycom's been challenged here and there on the earnings side, but its more than 7,000 partners, by and large, like what they're seeing. Miller in a free-wheeling interview spoke about the company’s major moves.

Back when Cisco bought Tandberg and there was a lot of talk about the video market consolidating, a lot of folks in the industry wondered what would happen to Polycom. They didn't see a clear strategy at the time. They do now. What is your message to Polycom partners looking to profit from video and the cloud?

We set out on this journey in the context of how can we make sure we augment and expand the partner opportunity to make money, and provide differentiation. We made it really clear that these cloud-based technologies we would not sell direct. We are partner- enabling all of these technologies and partners can sell CloudAxis much as they do other products today, through reseller and white-label agreements. So first and foremost, we did not change our philosophy about channel enablement.

Secondly, we brought solutions that allowed our partners to not only extend their product portfolios but have a clear differentiation vs. Cisco, LifeSize and others. We announced a lot at once -- there is some complexity there -- but we're now working hard with the channel on education and training. How do you sell next-generation, virtualized solutions? There's a lot there to absorb. But they're going to make good money and higher margins with what we're doing here.

ICT solutions and services provider, Dimension Data, has globally launched its Network Optimisation Assessment, a service that promises to help organisations review traffic patterns, flows, and volumes running across networks, and improve visibility.

The assessment involves technical interviews and deploying an appliance on the client’s network for a defined period of time to collect data and a variety of information about the network.

“In addition to the dramatic growth in traffic volumes on network, the type of traffic is changing, and the number of networked devices is exploding,” Dimension Data network integration national manager, Gregg Sultana, said.

According to Cisco Systems’ Global Cloud Index: Forecast and Methodology, 2010-2015 report, Cloud IP traffic is set to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 66 per cent in the period, account for 30 per cent of organisational datacentre traffic by 2015.

According to Sultana, the assessment is able to cover traffic discovery of all voice, video and application traffic, alongside information relating to protocols, ports, VLANs, traffic direction, and active hosts.

“Our experts in protocols, networking, data centres and applications provide a detailed report and are able to make recommendations on how the network performance can be improved. This is critical as organisations ready their networks for the emerging trends of video, mobility and particularly Cloud.”

To combat cloud, BYOD challenges.

Dimension Data has announced a new service to help organisations achieve highly granular levels of network monitoring and assessment to better adapt to the changing nature of data being driven by trends such as cloud and BYOD.

Launched globally today, the network optimisation assessment tool is supported by technical interviews as well as a maximum two-week deployment of an appliance on client’s networks, so as to collect data and a wide variety of information about network environments.

“In addition to the dramatic growth in traffic volumes on network, the type of traffic is changing, and the number of networked devices is exploding,” Gregg Sultana, Dimension Data’s national manager of network integration said in a statement.

“This is making high end-to-end performance difficult to achieve, given changes to underlying ICT infrastructure such as mobility, virtualisation, consolidation, and cloud.”

Clients using the network optimisation assessment services would gain detailed discovery of all voice, video and application traffic traveling across their networks. They would also have visibility of critical information relating to protocols, ports, VLANs, traffic direction, and active hosts.

“This is critical as organisations ready their networks for the emerging trends of video, mobility and particularly cloud.”

DiData said ROI for a typical WAN optimisation project can be achieved in between four and 18 months.

Mobility solutions provider Antenna Software has updated its AMPchroma platform giving more freedom in the creation of enterprise apps.

AMPchroma, a mobility platform designed for enterprises to run and manage mobile apps, now features a more flexible client allowing developers to deploy apps built with third party tools into the Antenna platform.

The client also allows apps build in standards-based languages such as JavaScript, HTML5 and CSS, as well as native software development kits (SDKs) for iOS, Android, BlackBerry and Windows Phone.

One of the more intriguing elements to the platform is a centralised management console, allowing app and data management, analytics and wipe software, with many features similar to MDM technologies such as AirWatch but with the aim of “bring[ing] MAM (mobile app management) to the BYOD enterprise”.

The improved product will look to integrate security and governance more tightly and according to Antenna CEO Jim Hemmer, it’s an element enterprises need to look at more seriously.

“Frequently, when companies start a mobile app development project, they think the biggest challenge is going to be designing and building the application,” he said, adding: “They underestimate either the complexity of security and integration, or the time it will take to get done properly”.

AMPchroma is so named because of AMP (Antenna Mobility Platform) and ‘chroma’, defined as “purity or intensity of colour”, relating to Antenna’s “unique...coverage of the entire mobile management lifecycle”.

Enterprise mobility features heavily in trends and predictions for 2013 according to recent reports, with Dimension Data’s Neil Campbell telling IDG that companies will begin to use cloud technologies and enterprise mobility more in the coming 12 months.

Peter Price, CEO of mobility specialists Webalo, told Forbes about his enterprise mobility trends for 2013. His first prediction was that “2013 will be the year of the app”, in part down to emerging platform as a service (PaaS) technology – something which resonates with AMPchroma.

ICT services and solutions provider Dimension Data announced it has achieved Cisco Cloud Provider Certification with a Cisco Powered Cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) designation.

The Cisco Cloud Provider Certification recognizes Dimension Data's investment in operating its data centers to offer cloud IaaS services in a multi-tenant environment to end clients.

Cisco as core networking technology

As part of the certification process, Cisco audited Dimension Data's Managed Cloud Platform (MCP), providing the assurance that the architecture fully supports the deployment of cloud services across public and private cloud environments leveraging Cisco as the core networking technology.

Announced in February this year, Dimension Data offers public and private cloud compute-as-a-Service (CaaS), a cloud IaaS that provides self-service, on-demand, provisioning of cloud-based compute, storage and networking resources on a global basis.

In the Asia Pacific, Dimension Data has data center facilities in Sydney, Australia.

Dimension Data has released a network assessment service that helps organisations review the traffic patterns, flows and volumes they have running across their networks, and improve visibility to accelerate business performance.

Available globally, the Network Optimisation Assessment involves technical interviews, and deploying an appliance on the client’s network for a defined period of time – typically seven to 14 days – to collect data and a wide variety of information about the network.

Michael Abendanon, Dimension Data South Africa General Manager, Network Integration, says: “In addition to the dramatic growth in traffic volumes on networks, the type of traffic is changing, and the number of networked devices is exploding. This is making high end-to-end performance difficult to achieve, given changes to underlying ICT infrastructure such as mobility, virtualisation, consolidation, and cloud.

“With our Network Optimisation Assessment, we’re able to provide clients with a detailed traffic discovery of all voice, video and application traffic flowing over the network, as well as all information relating to protocols, ports, VLANs, traffic direction, and active hosts. Our experts in protocols, networking, data centres and applications provide a detailed report and are able to make recommendations on how network performance can be improved. This is critical as organisations ready their networks for the emerging trends of video, mobility and particularly cloud,” says Abendanon.

Cloud computing is the most network-centric computing paradigm and it would simply not be a proposition without a resilient, stable, high performance network underpinning it. According to Cisco’s Global Cloud Index: Forecast and Methodology, 2010–2015 report, Cloud IP traffic will grow at a CAGR of 66% between 2010 and 2015. In addition, Cloud IP traffic will account for 30% of organisational data centre traffic by 2015.

Abendanon cites a global shipping company that Dimension Data performed an assessment on: “The client took action on the recommendations and was able to consolidate a significant portion of its branch infrastructure into centralised data centres, with no performance degradation. This resulted in savings for the client across its 200+ branches, while maintaining end user quality of experience when connecting to applications.

“The business case for a performance optimisation project is compelling, and the payback period on a typical WAN optimisation project is between four and eighteen months. The Network Optimisation Assessment is a good starting point,” he says.

Benefits of the Network Optimisation Assessment

• Provides visibility into and breakdown of existing network traffic patterns
• Provides accurate performance statistics on how the existing network is performing
• Identifies top network resource consumers (users and applications)
• Identifies network performance problems
• Enables more informed network planning, e.g. reviewing the network for voice, video or even cloud computing
• Allows for better selection of performance optimisation and network performance management solutions, e.g. which areas of the network would benefit from WAN optimisation or application delivery?

Dimension Data, a global ICT services and solutions provider, has made its Cloud Services for Microsoft available across the Middle East and Africa (MEA).

Dimension Data’s Cloud Services for Microsoft is a private cloud offering comprising managed Microsoft SharePoint 2010, Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 and Microsoft Lync 2010 hosted in a managed private cloud environment.

The offering is based on Microsoft’s productivity solutions.

Tony Munro, Solutions Executive: Dimension Data Africa, said “Our intention is to expand this solution into our MEA region rapidly by identifying the right clients to partner with to make this solution locally available to allow our clients to kick start their journey to the cloud with the security, compliance and customisation they require.

“By offering our clients managed productivity solutions in a private cloud environment, we are removing the barriers that previously inhibited some organisations from placing key business services in the cloud.”

Clients will be able to maintain the control they need to perform routine tasks through a self-service portal that automates provisioning, orchestration and management of the applications and underlying infrastructure.

The service leverages the South African ICT company’s CloudControl cloud management system and Microsoft System Center.

Over the next 12 months, Dimension Data plans to extend its cloud platform, develop new services offerings, and aggressively execute on its strategic plans, said Brett Dawson, CEO of Dimension Data, a global ICT and systems integrator with more than 15,000 employees and US$ 5.8 billion in annual revenues.

Trends such as globalization, IT as a service and software-defined networking (SDN) play directly into the company's cloud strategy. "As businesses expand globally into new markets, our global cloud footprint makes it easier to expand quickly," said Andy Cocks, Dimension Data's CTO of Asia Pacific (pictured above). "As businesses adopt cloud, they will be forced to become a service provider themselves to deliver IT internally as a service. As the rest of the industry moves toward SDN to allow the virtualization of networking resources, we believe this will accelerate the adoption of cloud IaaS."

Strategic pieces

Last year, Dimension Data acquired cloud hosting provider OpSource and BlueFire, a managed services company. "[The acquisitions enable us] to accelerate development of technology to deliver highly differentiated cloud services," said Cocks. "Our public and private cloud offerings are built on the same architecture and platform. We have coverage across 51 countries. We've also built our own cloud management system, CloudControl, which allows end users to configure servers, storage and even networks on the fly."

Dimension Data has rolled out five managed cloud platforms (MCPs) in the US, the Netherlands, South Africa and Australia. An MCP in Hong Kong will follow later this year. In June this year, the company launched its OneCloud Partner Programme to help service providers bring cloud services to market more quickly.

"There is a shift in mind set from viewing cloud as a way to reduce cost to a way to move faster, to be more agile," Cocks said. "While there is no doubt that the flexibility of the cloud allows you to reduce the cost of operations by automating many routine tasks associated with managing infrastructure, businesses will see a bigger impact to their bottom line by leveraging cloud to accelerate their business.

"Cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) allows IT to provision servers, storage and networking faster. Whereas it might take weeks to procure and setup a new physical server in a data center, a cloud-based server can be configured in five minutes."

Companies in Singapore are the most confident of their knowledge about cloud computing across the Asia-Pacific region, thanks to the strong push and lead by the government for enterprise cloud adoption and national efforts to attract service providers to make datacenter investments in the country.

According to the VMware Cloud Index 2012 report, 82 percent of Singapore respondents said they believed they had a strong understanding of cloud computing, higher than the regional average of 75 percent, said Michael Barnes, vice president and research director of Forrester Research, which conducted the study.

This was also the first time Singapore came out tops in this category, edging out Australia which held the position over the last two years, he added during a media briefing here Wednesday to unveil the results of the online survey.

Dimension Data this month globally streamlined its cloud services under a single brand, and launched a web page for its cloud services.

The company has eliminated its OpSource and BlueFire brands and is now selling all its IaaS offering under the Dimension Data name.

More salient to New Zealand, however, is the website, which marks the first time the company’s global offerings have been publicly marketed here.

The multinational IT giant sells its IaaS directly through the portal, but it is essentially running its own channel programme, the One Cloud Partner Programme.

“You effectively purchase, as a service, the whole infrastructure, sales and marketing collateral and run it locally as a multi-tenanted platform,” says Leigh Jackson, technology manager for Dimension Data. “Which for the New Zealand market that might appeal to some of the larger utility companies.”

The programme which the company rolled out in July and for which it already has reseller customers in New Zealand, is also being marketed for service providers. Jackson pointed to the company OneNet, which offers processing, storage and applications over the internet to its clients on an as-needed or permanent basis.

“There’s lots of room for our clients to pick and mix for exactly what they’re trying to achieve,” says Jackson.
“Certainly when some customers have concern around sovereignty and location of data, they might decide on a One Cloud provider for a production platform and another for their backup solution. We’re already brokering some of the cloud services, such as independent back up, for the likes of OneNet.”

Generally speaking, One Cloud brings a “full enterprise grade cloud service to market” for its customers, so they can take on a whole managed platform to be rebranded elsewhere.

While this isn’t the only model of its kind in New Zealand, or the first, it is an indication of the direction the channel writ large is taking for delivering on-demand, scalable services that can be purchased for short periods of time.

“I think largely this is going to reinforce the hybrid cloud model,” Jackson says. “The test and development systems, that makes sense to me, to leverage a public platform like this. For production systems and such, a customer needs to be asking what is the most cost effective and manageable for you and the outcome to that is smaller businesses will adopt SaaS and some hybrid model, while enterprise businesses will divvy up workloads, with a mix of SaaS and internal systems and testing and development moving to that hybrid cloud model.”

Renewable energy powered, and Iceland-based, infrastructure as a service cloud hosting provider GreenQloud announced on Tuesday that it has partnered with cloud application marketplace solution Standing Cloud to offer its users a “powered by Standing Cloud” selection of easily deployed and managed applications.

Standing Cloud offers a marketplace solution it pushes both to cloud hosting providers and to software vendors. For the hosting providers, it means a simple way for customers to deploy applications – popular CMS tools like WordPress, Joomla and Drupal, along with many others, for a total of 102 applications, according to the Standing Cloud application marketplace listing on the company’s website.

It promises hosting providers a means of making their cloud infrastructure more easily digestible and deployable to customers, a turn-key sort of solution via the now-familiar “app store” format.

Earlier this year, the WHIR featured Standing Cloud in a feature on how the “app store” model makes it possible for hosting providers to offer customers a custom cloud experience.

GreenQloud, based in Iceland, bills itself as a “truly green” cloud computing service, which according to the company means a public cloud infrastructure powered entirely by renewable energy (rather than using carbon offset credits), and providing customers with the means to live monitor their energy metrics and carbon savings.

The company’s cloud infrastructure is located in the Verne Global and Thor DC data centers in Iceland, which GreenQloud says operate on 100 percent geothermal and hydro power.

The company’s green efforts also include the operation of the TrulyGreen certification, which it extends to customers via a widget and a website badge, measuring them against a “checklist for important sustainability critiera.”

Interestingly, while “green” and “cloud” have each served independently as major buzzwords in hosting industry marketing during the last few years, there haven’t been many instances of operators pushing solutions that combine the two, as GreenQloud appears focused on doing.

While the use of the Q in the company’s name suggests that an existing company called “GreenCloud” might be on a similar track, the greencloud.com domain, at least, forwards to the GreenQloud site. There is a company called Green Cloud Technologies, with the domain gogreencloud.com, but it doesn’t seem to be particularly focused on the environmental connotations of the word “green,” beyond the basic efficiencies involved in moving IT load to the cloud.

Greencloud.net is a kung-fu school in Long island.

Green House Data, another Standing Cloud partner, does also focus simultaneously on “cloud” and “sustainable” messaging.

The GreenQloud partnership is another in a series of similar announcements for Standing Cloud, whose model is pursuing this kind of distribution partnerships with cloud hosting providers – a customer win, of a sort. Most recently, Standing Cloud announced a similar partnership with UK-based cloud hosting provider VPS.Net.

The service is popular with many of the leading providers in the cloud hosting market. Cloud partners listed on the Standing Cloud site include Amazon, Rackspace, SoftLayer, HP Cloud Services, GoGrid, Linde, Zunicore (PEER 1), Dimension Data, Atlantic.Net, Flexiant and others.

4:00 AM -- Having already heard about the finalists in the Best Telecom, Cable and Mobile product categories, it's time to take a closer look at Light Reading's 2012 Leading Lights Best New Service or Application (Telecom) shortlist.

Before we get into the profiles, just a reminder that you can see the full list of Leading Lights finalists here (free registration required).

The Leading Lights Awards and Light Reading Hall of Fame winners will be revealed on Wednesday, Nov. 7 at the Manhattan Penthouse in New York City.

So, in no particular order, let's look at the seven finalists for Best New Service or Application (Telecom).

Juniper Networks' Junosphere Lab
This is the hosted (oh, sorry: "cloud") service that enables service providers and enterprises to build networks in a virtual environment and then use them for proof of concept, testing, training or, well, pretty much anything they want.

It's a compelling service for many: Indeed, Juniper Networks Inc. (NYSE: JNPR) claims it has been used by more than 500 companies. Word is that Junosphere Lab is delivering on its promises and is being used by a number of operators to model entire new networks. This is never going to make Juniper a lot of money directly, but the benefits for all are pretty clear.

• Juniper Boasts Junosphere Traction
• Juniper Opens Its Junosphere Lab

XO Communications' 100G service
As much as anything, XO Communications Inc. (OTC: XOHO) is shortlisted for its commitment to building a nationwide commercial 100Gbit/s service across the U.S.

But it's more than that. This is a groundbreaking move that will give greater impetus to the 100Gbit/s ecosystem and hasten the availability of competitive, high-capacity services on key routes for enterprise and wholesale users. It's also a development that is putting a sparkle in the eyes of even the most cynical industry analysts and observers.

• XO Deploys First Nationwide 100G Network
• XO Adds Ciena to 100G Roster
• XO's Not Done Yet With 100G

Gartner has announced it’s annual magic quadrant for cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) for 2012. The list was compiled by Gartner analysts Lydia Leong, Douglas Toombs, Bob Gill, Gregor Petri, and Tiny Haynes. It examines the top 15 providers of infrastructure as a service, employing two main evaluation criteria, which include ‘ability to execute’ and ‘completeness of vision’.

For those unfamiliar Gartner describes its Magic Quadrants methodology as “a culmination of research in a specific market, giving you a wide-angle view of the relative positions of the market’s competitors. By applying a graphical treatment and a uniform set of evaluation criteria, a Gartner Magic Quadrant quickly helps you digest how well technology providers are executing against their stated vision.”

Magic Quadrants provide a graphical competitive positioning of four types of technology providers, where market growth is high and provider differentiation is distinct:

• Leaders execute well against their current vision and are well positioned for tomorrow.
• Visionaries understand where the market is going or have a vision for changing market rules, but do not yet execute well.
• Niche Players focus successfully on a small segment, or are unfocused and do not out-innovate or outperform others.
• Challengers execute well today or may dominate a large segment, but do not demonstrate an understanding of market direction.

Dimension Data is betting big on its cloud solutions business unit. The IT services provider is consolidating its OpSource and BlueFire cloud businesses under the Dimension Data brand, and the company expects to “significantly expand” the number of employees it has in the cloud solutions business unit in 2013.

This seems like the next evolution in the continuing expansion of Dimension Data’s cloud practice that has been going on all year. In February, the company launched a global cloud platform and services following the acquisition of OpSource the previous summer. Dimension Data followed that up in July with a new channel program intended to drive more of its revenue through cloud services providers.

All of these changes and additions is evidence of a strong focus on the future of its cloud solutions business. With one consistent brand instead of three, the IT services provider has a stronger message for both customers and the cloud services provider partners it is currently forging relationships with.

Dimension Data on Thursday said it has consolidated its cloud businesses into a unified cloud service under one brand.

The Johannesburg, South Africa-based IT services provider said it has brought together its OpSource and BlueFire cloud businesses.

Dimension Data acquired Santa Clara, Calif.-based OpSource on June 30, 2011. OpSource has cloud service operations in California, Virginia, the U.K, Ireland and India, working with more than 600 enterprises, service providers and software-as-a-service ISVs.

[Related: 7 Ways The Cloud Is Changing The Data Center]

The global services provider bought BlueFire, of Sydney, Australia, on Dec. 15, 2011. With more than 500 SMB customers in Australia, Asia and the Pacific, its services include cloud storage, productivity application hosting, desktop-as-a-service, email security, hosted telephony, private networks, disaster recovery, private networks, and disaster and backup recovery.

Dimension Data said the consolidated businesses will offer a broad range of cloud services that includes its Managed Cloud Platform and CloudControl cloud management system, along with public and private cloud services.

"In addition to stabilizing our global branding, we are improving our engagement with clients for greater clarity, sales velocity and greater alignment," Wesley Johnston, Dimension Data's executive vice president and COO for the Americas, said in an interview with CRN.

In July, the company unveiled in July its OneCloud Partner Program, which enables service providers and partners in education, government and financial trading sectors to quickly deploy cloud services.

This month the company rolled out a cloud services website, which lets customers buy cloud services and resources on-demand

Dimension Data announced today that its cloud businesses Opsource and BlueFire have been consolidated under the unified Dimension Data name. Both companies were acquired by the privately held Dimension Data in 2011, with BlueFire based out of Sydney, Australia and Opsource out of Santa Clara, California. As a newly formed single global entity, Dimension Data is positioning to continue its global expansion. Bluefire had specialized in cloud storage, DaaS, and a whole range of managed services. Opsource was a cloud and managed services company as well, emerging with a number of SaaS and IaaS products throughout its run. Dimension Data is based out of Johannesburg, South Africa and operates a number of IT services.

“On the 11th of October, Dimension Data formally announced that the OpSource and BlueFire brands have been consolidated under the aegis of Dimension Data. By bringing OpSource and BlueFire into the Dimension Data corporate family both in name and truth, our clients will enjoy consistent, seamless access to a broad range of expertise that can address every step of their journey to the cloud.”

Steve Nola, CEO of Dimension Data’s Cloud solution states:

“By rebranding OpSource and BlueFire to Dimension Data, we will be able to leverage our collective experience, including our Managed Cloud Platforms (MCPs), CloudControl cloud management system, and public and private cloud service offerings, to execute complex, multi-national cloud projects. In addition, our clients will be able to engage with us seamlessly for not only cloud, but also across the Group’s numerous solutions and service offerings. To support our growth plans, we will be adding a significant number of new employees to the Cloud Solutions Business Unit in 2013. We are confident the Dimension Data Cloud strategy will accelerate, and allow us to become a leader in the computing industry,”

ING Direct’s “Bank in the Box” implementation is one of the most wide-ranging and significant cloud projects completed in Australia this year, and the case was a highlight of the Asia Cloud Forum conferences held in Sydney last May and organized by Questex Asia.

Ben Issa, head of IT strategy at ING Direct Australia, was a keynote speaker at the Sydney event and presented the “Bank in the Box” project, which has made IT a major driver of innovation in the business and already delivered a major boost in productivity.

The move to the cloud at ING came from necessity. The IT department was simply not able to keep up with the demands of the business to roll out new products and deliver the innovation required.

There was a significant backlog in projects, with long lead times. The IT team needed to find a faster way to create new “copies” of the bank so they could accelerate time to market for new products and services. The project wasn’t about taking out cost so much as addressing a higher level business issue, and deliver an enabler for change and innovation.

Microsoft yesterday played host to 900 of its partners in Brisbane for its annual Australian Partner conference, awarding the top ranking 24 for 2012.

The top 24 were picked out of 300 nominations. Microsoft Australia boss Pip Marlow said in a statement the winners were ahead of the curve in terms of innovation, solutions and customer service. 

Unified comms specialist Generation-e was a multiple winner, taking out communications partner of the year as well as health partner of the year, as was Dimension Data with enterprise and private cloud partner of the year, and Readify with the software app and ISV software development categories.

Data#3 took out the award for business productivity partner of the year, as well as finalist positions in the desktop, education and private cloud categories.

Other multiple entries included Ensyst, Wardy IT, Datacom, OBS and Object Consulting.

See below for the full list of winners. 

Dimension Data will target security-conscious Australian enterprises with a new hosted Microsoft software offering to launch this year. The service provider last week unveiled plans to offer Microsoft SharePoint, Exchange Server and Lync as a service from its “managed private cloud environment”. Customers may choose to consume the Microsoft software from their own data centres or from single-tenant infrastructure within data centres operated by Dimension Data or its partners.

For the reseller community, cloud represents a time of reckoning. With SaaS providers delivering software direct to enterprise consumers and the large OEMs assembling services and appliances aimed at the painless and rapid deployment of  public, private and hybrid solutions, traditional reseller models have obscured, leaving many scrambling to find the way forward through the fog. For others in the reseller community, cloud represents opportunity – to develop new offerings, and engage with customers in a new way.

(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — ICT services and solutions provider Dimension Data announced on Monday it has expanded its new public managed cloud platforms, its integrated platform for the delivery of cloud services, into the growing cloud markets of Amsterdam and Sydney.

Summary: Dimension Data confirmed that its cloud infrastructure platform is online and running out of two new data centres.

OpSource has grown from its cloud and managed hosting beginnings to become a full-fledged go-to cloud infrastructure player. And with the backing of Dimension Data, which acquired the company last year, OpSource’s presence in the cloud can only go skyward.

Global ICT provider Dimension Data recently announced a comprehensive set of offerings aimed at helping organisations adopt cloud computing quickly.

 The company had already been operating its public cloud in the US, which it brought over from its OpSource acquisition in June 2011.

 Dimension Data has announced a series of cloud services for both public and private clouds that are intended to make it easier for organizations to adopt cloud computing more quickly. The services perform functions associated with planning, design, deployment and management of private, public and hybrid clouds. The new offerings include the Dimension Data Managed Cloud Platform, which helps deliver the cloud services, and Dimension Data CloudControl, a cloud management system that automates provisioning, orchestration, administration and billing. Services include advisory and consulting services on cloud enablement, integration services across IT systems and clouds, managed hosting, managed services, and value-added services such as disaster recovery.

 Dimension Data, an ICT services and solutions provider, has entered the global Cloud market with the overnight release of infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offerings designed to accelerate adoption of Cloud computing.

 Dimension Data unveiled a comprehensive range of cloud services aimed at making it easier for companies to accelerate their adoption of cloud computing.

 Dimension Data on Thursday is launching a public cloud offering that it says will compete with Amazon Web Services and Rackspace Hosting, among others. 

 Dimension Data cannonballed into the cloud pool today with a number of new enterprise cloud services, mostly acquired with its purchase of OpSource in June of last year.

 Gartner (News - Alert) has positioned Dimension Data, a global specialist IT solutions and services provider, in the Leaders Quadrant of the Magic Quadrant for Communications Outsourcing and Professional Services (COPS) report. 

 Dimension Data has achieved Microsoft Cloud Accelerate Partner status. Less than one per cent of Microsoft partners maintain this status globally.

In a global announcement made on Friday, group CEO of DiData Brett Dawson praised Nola's efforts in his decade-long Australian tenure.

"Under Steve's leadership, the Australian business has grown from revenues of US$365 million in 2002 to over US$1 billion today. Steve has also successfully transformed the Australian business from a reseller into an IT outsourcing and managed services focused business.

Dimension Data, the South African services giant, has bought a US-based enterprise cloud hosting and storage company called OpSource.

The company is creating a central Cloud Solutions Business Unit to house OpSource. It will report directly to chief executive Brett Dawson.