The cloud certainly de-emphasises the importance of the traditional technology stack, but for businesses only just starting to look at the cloud as an alternative to, or extension of, on-premise operations, their existing technology stack is still very important. That is one good reason service providers such as Carrenza gear their service offerings around the popular on-premise business platforms.
The company is targeting what it calls the enterprise cloud, aiming at providing a soup-to-nuts environment. It’s own technology stack is built around VMware, Oracle databases and applications, Cisco networking and the Microsoft platform and applications.
Its customer base largely consists of businesses starting to move from on-premise legacy environments out into the cloud. But the company is now starting to move up the value chain, and has a consulting arm that works with clients to help them scale applications – which is often why they make the initial move towards cloud service provision.
One area Carrenza specialises in is niche, cloud-based projects such as last year’s international online Monopoly game, run as a promotional exercise for the product. Here, players from around the world were able to play against each other, `purchasing’ streets that appear on the various versions of the famous board game. The company sees this as a classic demonstration of the scaling abilities of the cloud, in that the project started with four webservers and two database servers, but needed to scale within 48 hours up to 10 database servers and nearly 300 webservers.
The company is currently running the website for the London Design Festival, providing all necessary infrastructure support.
The archetypal fear of most businesses new to the cloud concerns data security and utilising shared resources. As the company has gone down the Cisco route it is able to give each customer their own resource pool behind the firewall, so anything happening with one client is not exposing any other client to risk. Every user is guaranteed their own resources on the virtualised platform. And they can readily opt for dedicated resources at extra cost, coupled with the ability to burst when needed.
Carrenza has one datacentre in London’s Docklands, a new facility due to come online in Milton Keynes before the end of the year, and is looking at a third opportunity. It measures itself on the number of cores available and the current datacentre has 2,000 cores under management. This environment is set to be replicated at the new Milton Keynes facility.
As the provision of basic datacentre resources starts to approach commodity market status the company is looking to move up the value chain. It is currently building up its consultancy and advisory service capabilities as part of this process. This includes having account managers concentrating on the specific needs of a small group of businesses. It is also gearing up to target the service aggregation market, pulling together applications and services that meet the needs of either a vertical market or a horizontal process for all businesses.
It recently launched its first aggregated package, a development and deployment platform for media and advertising agencies that links together the packages needed in that business. This demonstrates how the aggregation approach can work in that Carrenza claims such agencies can now set up the applications and services required by a new project in around five minutes, compared to a week. It is also offering services and consulting around Microsoft Exchange.
