Sify partners with VMware to deliver on-demand cloud solutions

Sify Technologies recently announced its partnership with VMware that will enable Sify to provide on-demand hosting (cloud) services to end-customers using the VMware vSphere 4 platform.

Sify has joined the global VMware Service Provider Program (VSPP), designed for service-providers who offer on-demand cloud services giving them the option to “rent” VMware software licenses on a monthly “pay as you go” basis. This model is aimed at helping Indian companies, both large and small, to safely tap computing capacity inside and outside their firewalls to help ensure quality of service for any application they want to run, internally or as a service.

P J Nath, Executive President, Enterprise Business, Sify, said, “This partnership will help us in making virtualized infrastructure available to a greater number of customers in a simplified way. For Sify to lead in the cloud service domain in India market, it was imperative to partner with a technology vendor who commands respect and has wider reach in secure virtualization initiatives, and VMware was our natural choice. Our partnership with VMware enables us to offer public, private and hybrid cloud to VMware customers for their Primary, Disaster Recovery (DR) or Business Continuity Program (BCP) proposition.”

The VSPP is a part of the VMware’s vCloud initiative which is designed to enable compatibility for all applications running in the cloud, whether on or off premise.

This partnership is aimed at helping Sify address the increasing demand for on-demand computing in India, which is one of the fastest growing cloud computing markets in the Asia Pacific region. Reference

TCS to bring the power of cloud computing to SMBs

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), the country’s biggest software exporter, is ready to roll out what is internally being talked about as group chairman Ratan Tata’s next dream project. The company’s senior management has even called it the ‘Nano of IT’. The ambitious project, which is a ‘cloud’ offering, is expected to be launched mid-September, with the lofty aim of making information technology affordable to the country’s 35 million small and medium businesses (SMBs).

Developed by a 250-member TCS team, the cloud offering promises to lower the cost of ownership by 35-40%, compared with the traditional licensing model. Expensive capex investments required in IT will be converted into a monthly subscription model. Pricing per user for the entire IT stack will be Rs 8,000-10,000 per month. The stack includes hardware, networking and software. New customers will be locked in for three years, sources close to the development told FE.

The service is expected to be a major growth engine for TCS. FE has learned that executives have been internally talking about raising up to $1 billion a quarter in the coming years from the service, though it is early days yet. Initially, the focus will be on the domestic market, but the firm plans to take the offering overseas later. To begin with, TCS is confident of adding 100 customers every quarter or 400 in a year’s time.

Cloud services, delivered over the Internet, are an on-demand paradigm that can disrupt the way IT services are delivered today. Cloud computing uses virtualisation technologies and can potentially make an enterprise shed all of its IT assets one day — servers, storage, and applications can all be rented as per the requirement from cloud service providers.

The TCS service has been piloted with 75 customers and Ratan Tata is likely to review the project later this month. “We are checking with his calendar and trying to get a date for the launch in September,” a source said.

When officially launched, this would be one of the biggest cloud rollouts in the world, and perhaps Ratan Tata’s last big-ticket project before he retires in 2012 as Tata group chairman.

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Agility and Flexibility in Rating and Billing

Cloud service providers should be capable of billing automatically based on any billing cycle. But one must not ignore the pains of a cloud service provider in calculating the usage of each and every customer, applying a specified rate plan, and generating a bill. So there should be a proper mechanism in generating a statement of account or invoice/bill.

Now the challenge here is, cloud service provider has to have a continuous watch on the usage consumption of its customer(s) which may prevent from significant revenue loss. Solution towards this is a Metering component, which integrates with cloud service providers database servers / control panel /virtualization platform to collect the usage detailed records (UDRs).

Does this accurate usage collection details really facilitate in generating usage based invoices/bills? In order to do so, a flexible rating engine should be in place to rate each individual service usage. Rating engine should allow service provider to comprehensively define different price rules and measure based on the usage. So rating engine should be extensible with no restriction on units of measurement, support flat and tiered (incremental) rating schemes and also support both the prepaid and post paid scenarios.

Following are the different rate plans a cloud service provider metering and rating system should support.

Volume based rate plan: Based on the total volume (e.g.: storage space) consumption, system should support incremental slab where price per unit varies. Depending on the total usage invoices are to be generated.

Time based rate plan: Any day of the week, day of the year and time of the day are considered in order to define different rate plans (Off peak, holidays, business hours etc). And based on these parameters the usage is been calculated and the bills are generated accordingly.

Billing: Invoicing/billing process will use the charges generated from rating engine i.e. discounts and tax calculation and posting them into accounts. Billing engine should also be flexible to support prorate rules while calculating the final invoice/bill.