There’s no shortage of evidence to prove that cloud computing is on an upward spiral: Apple’s recent launch of its iCloud could very well turn out to be yet another industry-changing iProduct; EMC CEO Joe Tucci has attributed the company’s recent 28% third-quarter net income growth to strong worldwide demand for its cloud computing and data storage products and services; and despite security concerns, NSA Director and U.S. Cyber Command Commander Gen. Keith Alexander said Thursday this week that cloud computing will in fact make the intelligence community more secure and efficient.
PwC issued a survey this week citing further evidence of this trend, particularly as it relates to infrastructure as a service (IaaS). The survey predicts that by 2014, a third of IT resources will be delivered via IaaS.
InformationWeek reporter Charles Babcock wrote an interesting article on the report, noting how this shift is causing fierce competition for legacy service providers in the IT outsourcing space, such as IBM and HP. “In short,” he says, “IT outsourcing is being disrupted by IaaS from cloud providers.” The comparison of legacy service providers in the IT outsourcing space to IaaS cloud providers is particularly interesting to me, because March just launched IaaS provider CloudSigma into the U.S. and our pitch was eerily similar. However, there was a key difference – instead of comparing CloudSigma to legacy service providers, we were comparing them to traditional IaaS cloud providers, like Amazon’s AWS and Rackspace, and showcasing how CloudSigma is disrupting the IaaS market itself.
Think about it: companies wanting to migrate their services to the cloud often encounter barriers when it comes to current IaaS offerings. Restrictions are placed on everything from compatible operating systems to the size of available servers, limiting companies’ ability to setup and maintain a suitable, tailored infrastructure in the cloud. CloudSigma, on the other hand, offers a flexible, open platform for customers to more easily build out their computing infrastructure, giving companies complete control and flexibility over their resources, data, pricing scheme and networking resources.
Despite the fact that CloudSigma is a March client, it’s clear that competition for in the IaaS marketplace isn’t just between legacy service providers and traditional IaaS cloud providers like Rackspace, Terremark and GoGrid. As GigaOm reporter Derrick Harris said in a recent article:
Everyone is trying to distinguish themselves with something. You want low cost and high performance? Storm On Demand is probably the best bet. Want fine-grained control over RAM and CPU levels? Give CloudSigma a try. “Fanatical support”? Rackspace. You get the point.
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This post was first published by Juliana Allen on March Communications’ blog, PR Nonsense.